[EM] election strategy paper, alternative Smith, web site relaunch

[C.Benham]

 From James Green-Armytage's paper on election strategy:

> I focus on the nine single-winner voting rules that I consider to be 
> the most widely known, the most widely advocated, and the most broadly 
> representative of single-winner rules in general:
> these are plurality, runoff, alternative vote, minimax, Borda, 
> Bucklin, Coombs, range voting, and approval voting8.

I would think that Schulze(Winning Votes) is more "widely advocated" 
than "minimax", aka MinMax(Margins).

> 2. Preliminary definitions
> 2.1. Voting rule definitions
> In this paper, I analyze nine single-winner voting methods. I follow 
> Chamberlin (1985) in including plurality, Hare (or the alternative 
> vote), Coombs, and Borda, and to these I add two round runoff, minimax 
> (a Condorcet method), Bucklin, approval voting, and range voting. My 
> assumption about incomplete ranked ballots is that candidates not 
> explicitly ranked are treated as being tied for last place, below all 
> ranked candidates. My assumption about votes that give equal rankings 
> to two or more candidates is that they are cast as the average of all 
> possible orders allowed by the rankings that they do specify.

http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/svn2010.pdf

I find these "assumptions" about ballots that are truncated or have 
equal-ranking to be very unsatisfactory.
It means that the version of Bucklin you are considering is a strange 
one (advocated by no-one) that fails the
Favorite Betrayal criterion. It would also fail Later-no-Help, which is 
met by normal Bucklin.

It means that the only version of minimax you can consider is Margins, 
and you can't consider Schulze(Winning Votes).
Unlike minimax(margins), Schulze(WV) meets the Plurality, Smith and 
Minimal Defense criteria.

> Alternative vote, or Hare: Each voter ranks the candidates in order of 
> preference. The candidate with the fewest first choice votes (ballots 
> ranking them above all other candidates in the race) is eliminated. 
> The process repeats until one candidate remains.

> Coombs12: This method is the same as Hare, except that instead of 
> eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes in each 
> round, it eliminates the candidate with the most last-choice votes in 
> each round.

Surely this is a museum curiosity that no-one currently advocates? This 
fails Majority Favourite, but I think there
is another version with a 'majority stopping rule'.

http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Coombs%27_method
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coombs'_method
http://www.fact-index.com/c/co/coombs__method.html

> 6.2.2. Compromising strategy results
> Tables 9-11 and figures 10-12 show the voting rules‘ vulnerability to 
> the compromising strategy, given various specifications. As shown in 
> proposition 4, Coombs is immune to the compromising strategy


Of course the version with the majority stopping rule isn't immune to 
that strategy (Compromise).

Chris Benham