[EM] S/WPO

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

James--

As you said, S/WPO apparently has no pure-merit disadvantage with respect to 
AERLO & ATLO, and S/WPO combines AERLO &I ATLO in a generalization. Of 
course, in principle, it's always better to give more choices to the voter, 
though, as you suggested, S/WPO might not be as practical a public proposal.

Having AERLO & ATLO as two separate options seems more likely to be 
understandable to the public, as opposed to giving them a bigger and more 
complicated generalization that can be used as AERLO or ATLO.

You said:

I see two subtly different possible ways to count weak preferences:
(1) The direction of pairwise defeats are determined by both strong and
weak preferences, and the strength of pairwise defeats are determined only
by strong preferences.

I comment:

Of coures that's using S/WPO as a simplification of Cardinal Pairwise.

(2) If there is a cycle, ballots are simply changed so that >> becomes >,
and > becomes =, and then an ordinary winning votes tally proceeds from
there.

That's the part that implements AERLO & ATLO, but is more general too. More 
complicated for the voter. I suggest AERLO and ATLO as ways of protecting 
the above-line candidates, in two different ways. One could apply AERLO & 
ATLO on the same ranking, of course. I'd expect that it would make the most 
sense to apply them both at the same point, to protect the same best-set of 
candidates, but of course each could be applied anywhere.

I have some reservation about S/WPO having both of your two meanings for the 
">" and ">>", because the voter might just want to use one of those two 
options at a particular place.

If one is going to have a generalization like that, then why not go the rest 
of the way with it, and give the voter the option of which, or both, of 1) 
and 2) s/he intends to use at a particular ranking point.

One other thing. It's true that the mark of (otherwise) successful offensive 
order-reversal is an all-majority-defeats Smith set. So if AERLO or ATLO's 
only purpose were to thwart or deter offensive order-reversal, then it 
should only take effect if the cycle is a majority cycle.

But I'd use AERLO for another purpose, other than just anti-order-reversal: 
I'd use it to protect the best-set candidates even in the event of a natural 
non-all-majorities cycle.

So, if it had to be either yes or no, for the majority requirement, I'd 
prefer to leave out the majority requirement for AERLO & ATLO taking effect.

So, for instance, I'd word AERLO:

The voter may mark a line in his/her ranking, to indicate that if none of 
his/her above-line candidates wins, and if a circular tie contains 
above-line and below-line candidates, then that voter wants to promote all 
his/her above-line candidates to 1st place, and repeat the count.

[end of AERLO definition]

The ATLO definition is the same, except that it drops the below-line 
candidates instead of promoting the above-line candidates.

So, if specifying that that circular tie be an all-majorities circular tie 
has to be in or out of AERLO and ATLO, I'd leave that requirement out. 
Better to have AERLO useful in non-all-majority natural circular ties, even 
if that means having it take effect when it isn't needed for deterring 
offensive order-reversal.

Of course the ideal would be to give the voter the option of whether he 
wants the cycle referred to in the AERLO & ATLO definitions to have to be a 
majority cycle. Then, if the voter is only interested in 
order-reversal-deterrence or thwarting, and doesn't want to use it 
otherwise, then s/he could specify on the ballot that only majority cycles 
count.

But that's a complication, and I'd suggest, at first at least, just leaving 
the majority-cycle requirement out, and defining AERLO & ATLO as I defined 
them above in this message.

Mike Ossipoff

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