[EM] thoughts on the pairwise matrix

[Paul Kislanko]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Ketchum [mailto:davek at clarityconnect.com] 
> Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 10:34 PM
> To: Paul Kislanko
> Cc: 'Rob Brown'; election-methods at electorama.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] thoughts on the pairwise matrix
> 
> You are mixing two topics:

No, actually I was only talking about the second.

> 
> By "wrong" I assume you mean counting something different 
> than what was 
> voted, accidentally due to carelessness, or deliberately for 
> evil reasons.
> 
> Certainly an important topic, but such wrongs are possible 
> regardless of 
> election method and DO NEED attention.
> 
> A second topic is whether voters are PERMITTED to vote their desires 
> reasonably completely and understandably - here method matters.  A 
> frequent occurrence is three competitive candidates, A, B, 
> and C, with the 
> voter seeing A as desirable, B as tolerable, and C as INtolerable:
>       Plurality - voter cannot SAY that both A and B are better than C
>       Approval - voter cannot SAY that A is better than B AND 
> both are 
> better than C.
>       Condorcet - voter CAN say A>B>C.

And in some methods I can say A=B>C, which may or may not be closer to my
preference. I also prefer A>B and for heaven's sake NEVER C. Which gets into
the value of truncation and the subjective interpretation of what that
means.

It's the subjective interpretation of ranked ballots accompanied by the
method's claim that it is objective with no unstated assumptions that I find
bothersome. Not bothersome enough to dislike such methods, but enough to
want more precision in the descriptions and "proofs" accompanying them.