[Election-Methods] USING Condorcet

[Dave Ketchum]

Saying it more carefully:
      When ranking another candidate, this means giving the same rank to 
all the equally best liked among those considered.
      There can always be another pass at ranking, so it is never 
necessary to include a candidate just because they must get ranked.
      Whenever the remaining pool of candidates contains none that you 
would prefer to have win over the others, you are DONE.  Note that 
positive liking is not involved - only better liking.
      When a candidate that you did not rank wins, and you care, time to 
consider whether you did adequate analysis of the pool - but can be a 
simply strange election.

Rank best liked candidate with maximum rank.

Rank best liked remaining candidate at next rank.  Repeat until no more to 
rank.

Nothing above about approval cutoff.  That has meaning in Approval, but 
not here.

Causing or avoiding cycles is a tempting goal - generally impractical to 
know enough to expect success at either.

Election characteristics can matter:
      With the win expected to go to one, or one of a pair of, candidates, 
the strays expected to lose are not worth great effort.
      With several roughly equal candidates, careful analysis is more 
important.

DWK

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008 13:37:19 +0000 (GMT) Kevin Venzke wrote:
> 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
-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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