[EM] Approval with 2 ballotings

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Gervase--

You wrote:

In an e-mail sent to me 1 year ago today(!), Mike Ossipoff suggested doing
a 2 round (or more strictly a 1.5 round) Approval election.

I reply:

I´d heard of that method in an article which was probably by Tideman & 
Fishburn. Maybe Tideman & Brams.

You continued:

In the 1st
round, the candidate with the most Approval votes above 50% of the votes
is the winner.  If no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes, then a
2nd round takes place, with the same candidates as in the 1st round.

I reply:

Didn´t I say "...votes from over 1/2 of the voters"? Two or more voters 
could get votes from more than half of the voters, so the whichevever of 
those gets the most votes wins in the 1st round.

You continued:

The idea is that the 1st round acts as the accurate poll with which voters
in the 2nd round would use.  In order to make the 1st round as accurate as
possible, you "threaten" the voters with the fact that there can be a
winner in the 1st round.

However, I don't think the 50% of votes level is right.  What really needs
to be done is to calculate a level where there is a 0.5 probability (i.e.
50% chance) of there being a winner after the 1st round.

I reply:

The better majority rule is enforced, the better the strategy problems are 
gotten rid of.

The authors of the article that I mentioned were discussing the BF(mean) 
strategy in the 2nd round of that 2-round method, based on the results of 
the 1st round.

Maybe, but it seems to me that it would be best to encourage people to vote 
only for their favorite in the 1st round, unless they have a good reason not 
to--for instance if they consider several candidates nearly equally better 
than or worse thaln all the others.

It seems to me that they were discussing what that method would do when used 
with that strategy.

Mike Ossipoff

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