[EM] James: Your majority-rule classifying & naming

[James Green-Armytage]

>You said that Approval and CR were "pseudo-majority methods", because the 
>information needed for their strategy is only available from outside the 
>voting system.
>Wrong. Each Approval election, by its reported vote totals, gives 
>information for subsequent Approval strategy.
>If Nader outpolls the Republican, then Nader-preferrers will know that
>they 
>needn't vote for the Democrat in subsequent elections.

	Okay, this is an interesting point, but we need to generalize it a bit to
make it more widely applicable. So, if your first choice is polling
comfortably ahead of your third choice, there is no need to approve your
second choice, right? Or, if your Nth choice is polling comfortably ahead
of your (N+2)th choice, there is no need to vote for your (N+1)th choice.
So far so good, but this is a special case and only takes us so far...
>
>Approval quickly homes in on the voter median, and then stays there.

	I feel that more information is needed to support this claim.
>
>Condorcet goes directly to the voter median in its 1st election. Approval
>& 
>CR do so in thei r 2nd election. That's the price of simplicity and easy 
>proposability.

	You don't seem to be taking into account the possibility that the voter
median will change from election to election, as the candidates change,
the issues in play change, and the electorate itself changes. A lot of
major public offices only come up for election every 4-6 years, in which
time a lot of the above variables are likely to change. If approval
strategy is always based on the previous election, then it may have a
tendency to lag too far behind the reality to be totally effective.
>
>Myerson & Weber point out that Approval (and CR) guarantee that if
>there's a 
>candidate at the voter median position, s/he will be the only candidate
>who 
>can win at Myerson-Weber equilibrium.

	I don't fully understand the statement that you are making here; I feel
that the wording is somewhat ambiguous. Is this statement not also true of
plurality? 
>
>  Because critreria and standards are individual, subjective, and 
>relativist, your criteria and standards, and your preference among
>methods 
>aren't wrong. But your statement about where Approval's strategy
>information 
>must come from is incorrect. And your proposed classification name foir 
>Approval and CR is silly.
>
	Which one? "Pseudomajority methods", "plurality methods"? Or both? I
agree that "pseudomajority methods" is a bit more of a loaded term than it
has to be. Maybe I won't use that too often. "Plurality methods" still
kind of makes sense to me, though. But anyway, I don't feel strongly about
it. If nobody likes these names, then they can feel free to not use them. 

Sincerely,
James Green-Armytage
fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/voting.htm
http://fc.antioch.edu/~jarmyta@antioch-college.edu/voting.htm

P.S. Sorry to hear about your web site; I thought that it was a good site,
and I think it was the first site I read about Condorcet's method.