[EM] Re: majority rule criteria--alternative nomenclature

[RLSuter at aol.com]

This is Ralph Suter replying again to James Green-Armytage,
quoting his message of Thu, 13 Jan 2005:

James wrote:

    Do you mean a situation where there is less than a few minutes
to come to a decision? I could see approval being helpful there.
But if there is at least that much time, it's quick enough to fill out
a ranked ballot and then count the key pairwise comparisons by
show of hands.

My response:

    Mike Ossipoff answered you pretty well in his "counting time"
response. In addition, a big problem I have with your answer is
that I suspect it's totally theoretical. Have you ever actually tried
to use a ranked ballot method in a meeting? You talk about it
taking only "a few minutes," but I think you are being wildly
optimistic unless you are thinking about a very simple 3 or 4
option decision by a very small group of people. But in real
life, things are often much more complicated.
   I'll cite just two examples of actual decisions I was
involved with. One was at the 1996 founding convention
of an organization tentatively named "The Alliance." There
were over 300 people at the convention, and one decision
they needed to make was to choose a permanent name
from a dozen or so choices that had been winnowed down
from a much larger list by a name committee. I had learned
about Condorcet voting from Steve Eppley, but any kind
of ranked ballot method would have been out of the question.
The best method by far would have been Approval, but at
the time neither I nor anyone else at the convention knew
about it. I believe a two stage process was used, with the
final decision made by plurality from among a smaller
group of names that had been chosen by plurality in the
first stage. Nevertheless, the actual vote and the counting
of it took several hours. A one step approval vote from
among the entire original list of names would have gone
more quickly and probably would have been a more
satisfactory method. I was happy with the name that
was chosen (Alliance for Democracy), but like many
other people at the convention, I had misgivings about
the voting process used.
   Another example was a board meeting of a national
organization with a dozen or so people present. A
decision had to be made about where to hold the next
meeting. Approval voting was used, and it went well, with
everyone very satisfied with the process. An unusual
aspect of it was that instead of making a list of possible
meeting locations and then voting on them, locations
were suggested one at a time and approval votes were
taken after each name was suggested. Again, ranked
ballots would have made the process much more time
consuming and probably less satisfactory. Ranking
many different possible meeting locations also would
have been difficult for most people, whereas it was
fairly easy to decide whether to approve or disapprove
each proposed location. So I think ranked ballot voting
would have been overkill in that case and would have left
people less satisfied with the process if not also less
satisfied with the outcome.

I'll have to respond to other parts of the message at
another time.

-Ralph Suter