[Election-Methods] USING Condorcet

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Brian,

(Sorry to everyone I haven't been responding to. My computer died and I'm
still trying to recover.)

--- En date de : Lun 30.6.08, Brian Olson <bql at bolson.org> a écrit :
> De: Brian Olson <bql at bolson.org>
> Objet: Re: [Election-Methods] USING Condorcet
> À: "Election Methods Mailing List" <election-methods at electorama.com>
> Cc: "Dave Ketchum" <davek at clarityconnect.com>
> Date: Lundi 30 Juin 2008, 23h37
> On Jun 30, 2008, at 9:51 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote:
> 
> > Condorcet provides for ranked approval for more than
> one candidate.   
> > This
> > DOES NOT justify trying to get voters to rank more
> than they approve  
> > of.
> > And, while I write above for voters to learn about
> other candidates,  
> > I do
> > not see demanding that they try harder to learn about
> strays.
> 
> It's worth rating everyone because if you wind up not
> getting any of  
> the ones you 'approve of' you can still have some
> say in which of the  
> rest of them you get.

I don't entirely agree. I would rank below my strategically-determined 
approval cutoff (if I suppose the same election could be held also under 
Approval), but I wouldn't rank that much lower, and I don't think other 
voters should either.

Two reasons for this.

1. If you rank everybody and are predictably sincere, burial strategy
by other voters is more likely to succeed against you. People who would
use this strategy need to have doubt about what you're going to do.
Truncating at the (strategically determined) approval cutoff is good at
this: The main effect is that voters don't rank all the frontrunners,
and burial strategy works basically by assuming one frontrunner will
get support from another.

2. If everyone is persuaded (or forced) to rank all the candidates that
they can, this would seem to add substance to the criticism that there
is no guarantee that "everybody's second preference" (etc.) is any good at 
all. Typically my response to this criticism is that if a candidate is so 
bad that his election would be cause to complain about the method, then 
voters shouldn't be voting for this candidate in the first place. That
response doesn't work if voters will be advised to rank everybody they can.
(You can still argue that Condorcet gives the reasonable result, but to
critics it will still seem like a potentially terrible one.)

I should note that these points are only relevant to Condorcet methods
where truncation is useful in addressing these issues.

Kevin Venzke



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