[EM] Favoring a frontrunner

Dave Ketchum davek at clarityconnect.com
Fri Dec 5 18:06:19 PST 2008


My point was ONLY that the voter could have equal feeling as to the 
frontrunners.  Here Abd offers some thought on that topic.

DWK

On Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:53:09 -0500 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 11:31 PM 12/4/2008, Dave Ketchum wrote:
> 
>> Favored frontrunner?  Trying to add some thought.
>>
>> Agreed to "first rate a favorite and the worst".
>>
>> Then the standard thought is "the voter rates the frontrunners".
>>
>> This needs careful thought.  It is likely that one of the frontruners 
>> will win.  This voter has two obvious approaches to select from:
>>      IF this voter has a preference, proceed as Abd and others suggest.
>>      BUT if this voter sees them as equally desirable or undesirable, 
>> it is proper to treat them as such.
> 
> 
> It's "proper" and it improves the results overall, but it is an 
> abstention with regard to the realistic election pair. That's fine. But 
> if the voter has a significant preference -- suppose those were the only 
> two candidates on the ballot, would you bother voting? -- I'd not 
> suggest voting that way. Make a choice, if it matters. If not, sure, 
> stand aside and let people who care make the decision.
> 
> With your vote equating them, you can express, still, whether you accept 
> them or not. That can be important if a majority is required (the Range 
> method then must have an explicit method of indicating that the voter 
> will accept the election of each candidate, easy to do, probably the 
> easiest is that the voter rates the candidate above midrange -- or maybe 
> at midrange.)
-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
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