[EM] A few more comments about Russ's MMPO posting

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Russ says:

Imagine the following scenario. MMPO has been adopted for a major
election. The results come in, and a Condorcet winner exists but does
not win. With MMPO, that would not be unlikely at all. Maybe the
Condorcet Loser even wins. Now imagine what the supporters of the CW are
going to say:

"Hey, wait a minute. Are you telling me that my guy beat every other
candidate but didn't win the election? What kind of brain-dead system is
this? Who were the idiots who designed this scheme? Why do we bother
with pairwise tallies if we are just going to ignore them?"

I comment:

...beats in a different method, Russ, by a different meaning of "beats", 
which is specific to and limited to a different method (Condorcet's method).

Russ is a little confused about which method's terms he's using.The notion 
of candidates beating other candidates in 2-candidate races, each 
2-candidate race having a winner and a loser, is a specifically, exclusively 
Condorcet notion. It's part of Condorcet's method, and is meaningless 
outside of Condorcet's method.

In MMPO, though a candidate's score is determined from pairwise vote-totals, 
they're compared, for the purpose of finding the final winner, only among 
the entire set of candidates. In that sense, MMPO is a one-step, direct, one 
count method.

Condorcet's intermediate 2-candidate races, with their winner and loser, 
their pairwise defeats, which are used in various different ways to 
determine the final winner among all the candidates, amount to a 1st part of 
a two-part count. First the winners are determined for all the 2-candidate 
races, and then, the resulting "pairwise-defeats" are, in turn, used to 
determine the overall winner among all the candidates.

That's artificial and indirect. An artificial division of the count into 2 
separate counts.

MMPO's 1-step score-comparison, among the entire set of candidates, is more 
natural, direct, obvious, and brief.

The hypothetical angry voter that Russ quotes above is apparently a 
dedicated Condorcetist who doesn't quite understand that methods using 
pairwise vote-totals don't have to be Condorcet's method.

So, to return to Russ's question, what idiot is all confused about the 
difference between what "beat" means in Condorcet and in MMPO, and about the 
difference between those two methods and their terminology? The same one 
that has been attempting angry confused attacks ever since he was told that 
he was no longer welcome to host my articles, definitions, proposals, etc. 
at his website.

Mike Ossipoff

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