[EM] ERBucklin(whole) & FBC

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

A while back I said on EM that Bucklin met FBC, but Markus posted a Bucklin 
FBC failure example. I don't know if I'd said that ordinary 
non-equal-ranking Bucklin passes FBC, or if Markus's demonstration was based 
on an incorrect definition for a majority in Bucklin.

It seems to me that, in Markus's example, Bucklin failed because of how the 
upranking of favorite to 1st place affected what consitutes a majority. But 
a majority in Bucklin is a vote total greater than more than half of the 
voters, as opposed to more than half of the votes cast. As I said, I don't 
know which explanation explains that failure example.

It certainly does sound as if ERBucklin(whole) passes FBC. That's 
encouraging that such a well known method as Bucklin has an obvious version 
that meets FBC.

Shall I call it ERBW? It meets SDSC, but it loses SFC compliance. Bucklin, 
not being a pairwise-count method, has an easier handcount. But that doesn't 
seem an important issue, because public elections are where FBC compliance 
is really needed. Bucklin's FBC compliance is a nice added benefit for 
organizations that want rank-balloting but don't do a computer count.

Bucklin probably doesn't ever need strategic lower ranking or power 
truncation, due to being stepwise instead of pairwise.

I don't know which is better. Certainly MDDA (which I call "Majority 
Choice") has a briefer and simpler definition, and that's probably the 
decisive factor, since the two methods' merit seems similiar. Criteria-wise, 
MDDA seems  better too, since it meets SFC.

Mike Ossipoff

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