[EM] election-methods Digest, Vol 37, Issue 14

[ws at cs.brown.edu]

About DYN, Condorcet then range, and range then top-two runoff: I'm concerned
about using a complicated method for three reasons.
1) Complicated methods have a lot of design decisions. Voters will be unhappy if
their candidate lost, but would have won if a design decision were done
differently.
2) Voters need to understand the voting method. IRV, approval and range are
simple enough. Pure Condorcet is marginal. Anything more complicated is too
complicated IMHO.
3) When a flaw is found in a design, there's a natural temptation to add another
feature to fix this flaw. If you aren't careful, you can end up with a design
that's still flawed, but is so complicated that you can't tell what the flaws
are. Remember the KISS principle in engineering: keep it simple stupid.

Mike Ossipoff: can you explain in more detail how winning margins fixes the bad
example I mentioned in my paper? Here's how I see it: if the blueists burry
(B>H>R) and the redists truncate (R>H=B), the votes are: B vs R: 50 to 50. B vs
H: 49 to 2. R vs. H: 49 to 51. The weakest defeat is B over H, so Hitler wins as
before, right?

BTW, "L" and "R" in my paper should be "B" and "R", for blue and red. I'd
previously named the candidates "left" and "right".

ws


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