[EM] ignoring "strength of opinion"

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 08:16 PM 12/1/2005, rob brown wrote:
>My wording was a bit sloppy, because it is true that condorcet 
>SOMETIMES can reward insincere voting.  It is not perfect.  It is, 
>in my opinion, really really close....close enough that insincere 
>voting will not have a significant effect on elections, and most 
>importantly to me, will allow middle ground candidates to be elected 
>rather than forcing people into two opposing clusters.

Yet there is *never* any motive to vote insincerely in Asset Voting. 
In the simplest implementation (and the simplest strategy, which is 
not weaker than more complex strategies), you simply vote for the 
candidate you prefer.

Because of the Asset revoting, if your candidate does not win in the 
first pass, your vote is not wasted. Either than candidate gathers 
other votes or that candidate provides the vote to *his or her* best choice.

Simple. Uses the simplest possible ballot (though, because there are 
no losers, more people may make themselves available as candidates, 
so a ballot could get long). Cannot elect a candidate without the 
direct or indirect consent of a majority of voters.

(If a majority of the voters or their effective representatives -- 
the candidates they voted for -- consider it more important to hold 
out, to delay the election by refusing to reassign votes, then, 
essentially, a majority is deciding that it is not ready to elect a 
winner. Why should a minority be allowed to determine that a winner 
should be declared with less than a majority vote? In one very 
successful organization, delegates must be elected by a *two-thirds* 
vote. If after multiple rounds, no candidate receives that vote, the 
delegate is chosen by lot from the top two candidates. If it were up 
to me, I'd have the process include all candidates, with the chance 
of winning being determined by how many votes they received. This 
would effectively produce a kind of proportional representation.... 
but the system, as it is, works phenomenally well; where a group 
electing a delegate can't agree on the winner by a two-thirds vote, 
then the minority does have some chance of being represented.
)