[EM] Defensive strategy for Condorcet methods

[Andy Jennings]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:

> From my experience talking to normal people not already interested in
> voting or math, I think that it is very important to keep your list of
> proposals short. 1 is good, 2 is tolerable, 3 is approximately pointless,
> and anything more is clearly counterproductive.
>
> Since I understand that I'm probably not going to convince the condorcet
> supporters here, I'm willing to include a Condorcet proposal. Since I value
> offering a simple option, I think that proposing (Some Condorcet) or SODA is
> better than just advocating (Some Condorcet). Still, I strongly urge that
> our statement should not go beyond two well-explained proposals, though it
> should endorse by simple mention a number of other systems (Schulze, Range,
> MCA, MJ...).
>

I strongly believe that plain Approval, plain Range, some Condorcet method,
and a median-based method (perhaps MJ?) should be tried in real political
elections to see what happens, so I would hate to see any of these not get
mentioned at all.  Now I can't guarantee that each method's nightmare
scenario won't happen, but I would surely like to see each one tried.  Maybe
mentioning these systems in passing is good enough.

I do agree that the shorter we can keep the list of proposals, the better.
 But are we ready to settle on SODA and something else?  To me, SODA seems
like a pretty good system so far, but it seems like we should analyze it for
a while more before we decide to endorse it.  After all, it was only
invented a couple of weeks ago and it seems like we're still adjusting the
details.

Also, do we need to worry about endorsing methods that nobody has ever heard
of?  I'm afraid that if we endorse SODA, then nobody will take us seriously
because they've never heard of it before.  Just as an example, Schulze seems
to have some name-recognition on the internet.

Maybe a necessary first step is to write up SODA in the Electorama wiki, to
write up a blog post about it, and to try to get it featured on some news
sites.  Slashdot and HackerNews seem like good targets, since programmers
seem disproportionately interested in voting systems.

Andy
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