[EM] "scored condorcet", etc

[rob brown]

On 11/21/05, Dave Ketchum <davek at clarityconnect.com > wrote:
>
> An aside - Plurality is not broken - it does EXACTLY what it was designed
> to do. Problem is that those of us who bother to think about it want
> something else.


I suppose if what you say it was designed to do is "select the plurality
winner", well yeah, it does what it was designed to do. But that is rather
obvious and redundant.

If you say it was designed to, say, "select a reasonable candidate", I stand
by my statement that it is broken.

BUT, I do not understand your words about parties - Plurality pushes
> toward two strong parties while Condorcet gives parties enough visibility
> that more might thrive.


In some ways I think the term "party" is not a very good term. Of course,
people will always gather together to advance various causes or candidates,
and that is great.

I am referring to a more specific thing, which is the phenomena whereby
people incur strategic advantage by gathering together prior to an election
and deciding among themselves which candidate they wish to advance, so as to
avoid splitting the vote.

I think this is the number one reason for parties in the US. Parties would
still exist in the absense of a system susceptible to vote splitting, but I
don't think they would be highly polarized in the way they are today, nor
would they be as powerful and so dominate government. Also, I think they
would tend to concentrate more on specific causes (for instance, a
"pro-choice" party or what have you), rather than on choosing and then
advancing candidates.

> Your mention of IRV makes me wonder what you are thinking of:


My mention of IRV simply was saying that IRV, like condorcet, does not
produce output that is easy to grasp by average joes. I don't in any way
propose mixing IRV in.

Condorcet with something else mixed in, such as Approval - too
> complex - leave this as a challenge to those wanting such.


Yeah. Yuk.

The rest of your post seemed to be explaining to me what the pairwise matrix
is all about, and I already know all that. I think you kind of missed the
point of what I am after. I want something that gives a single score per
candidate. The pairwise matrix would still exist, but somewhere between the
pairwise matrix and the final selection of a single candidate, I want an
intermediate result with one score per candidate. Apparantly MinMax does
this, but it might not be as good a method as others, as well as producing
scores that would need some normalization prior to displaying as, say, a bar
graph (i.e. the best score is zero or possibly a negative number, with no
clear "theoretical worst score"). Still, it is in the direction I am going.

-rob
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