[EM] Majority Criterion poor standard for elections

[Dave Ketchum]

What is this all about?

Let's forget "majority winner" for the moment, and look at the basic problem.

Assume the voters are stubbornly split 3 ways such that for IRV or 
Condorcet they vote:
    32 A
    33 B
    35 C
    Condorcet will declare C the winner, without worrying about majority.
    IRV will discard A and declare C majority winner of what is left.

Range voters can give maximum possible range values to the above three 
candidates as best liked, plus minimum possible range values for any 
others they must include - thus agreeing that C is the proper winner.

Range voting is beyond me - couple thoughts:
      Let voters be, at least mantally, identical twins - and the range 
values they assign could be consistent - but we DO NOT HAVE such voters. 
REAL voters have NON-identical minds.
      Voters CAN LEARN what values will have the strongest effect on 
assigning winners - and be tempted to use these values - perhaps due to 
greed; perhaps to respond to expected actions by other voters.

Below I see mention of random.  Now true ties are possible, and random 
choices among them are fine,  But, for anything else, randomizing reads as 
losing interest in voters' preferences.

DWK

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 02:20:46 +0930 Chris Benham wrote:
> Simmons, Forest wrote:
> 
> 
>>It seems to me that if there is a majority winner, then she should at least have a chance of winning.  What if we chose by random ballot from among all of the candidates that have a majority beat path to the Range winner (with a final approval vote to ratify this choice)?
>> 
>>
> 
> Why not just "automate" that and with one trip to the polls elect the 
> winner of the pairwise comparison between the Range winner and a 
> randomly chosen candidate with a beatpath to the Range winner, to make a 
> pretty terrible method  (but still better than Range) with a strong 
> random element?
> 
> Chris  Benham
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  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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