[EM] Re: Approval scenarios, part 1

MIKE OSSIPOFF nkklrp at hotmail.com
Thu Jan 20 15:33:17 PST 2005


James--

  Yes, the result of the 1st election is as you said. I don't know how I got 
a different result, but
I probablly didn't include the RLC voters and the LRC voters. I probably 
just asked "How many of these are voting for C as a compromise?"

In the 2nd election,, with the same candidates or their parties, the RCL 
voters, having noticed that R outpolled L in the 1st election, might decide 
not to vote for C. But the L voters will have noticed that too, and so the 
half of the LCR voters who'd not voted for C would have good reason to vote 
for him. '

Anyway, if they didn't, and R won, then they'd do so in the next election, 
and the ones after that, and C would keep winning.

One thing that I wanted to mention is that my demonstration about that 
seemed pretty convincing:  Favorite is the voter median candidate. Believing 
that Sleazy is needed to beat Worst, everyone preferring Sleazy to Worst 
votes for Sleazy and not for Worst. Because Favorite is the voter medilan 
candidate, a majority prefer him to Worst. Favorite is betweent them and 
Worst. So Favorite outpolls Worst. So that majority know that they don't 
need to vote for Sleazy in order to beat Worst. But Sleazy outpolls 
Favorite, and if there's some lesser-evil between Favorite & Sleazy, Sleazy 
could become the greater-evil. But the same thing would happen again in the 
next election, and that new lesser-evil would be shown to be unneeded for 
beating Sleazy. Etc. As I said, soon Favorite would be winning, and would 
keep winning every time.

That assumes a 1-dimensional political spectrum, a 1-dimensional 
issue-space. I don't know whether that is needed in order for a 
demonstration like that to work. Maybe you or someone else could show that 
Approval does or doesn't necessarily home in on the voter median when there 
are more than 1 issue dimension.

By the way, those LRC voters and RLC voters aren't really a fair thing to 
includle.

Mike Ossipoff

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