[EM] round robin tournaments RBJ

[robert bristow-johnson]

i'm selecting smaller segments to respond to.  i might select another  
small segment.

On Jun 29, 2011, at 2:39 AM, Kevin Venzke wrote:

>>
>> Winning Votes has *no* salience attached to how close or
>> decisive an election is.  i just cannot get past
>> that.  a measure of how decisive an election is, is a
>> factor and how many voters weigh in on the election is a
>> factor also.  Margins represents the product of those
>> two factors in a simple and elegant manner.
>
> Are there any other methods that have "salience attached to how  
> close or
> decisive an election is"?

sure, Ranked Pairs, Schulze, MinMax using Margins.

> It seems important to you but where does it come from?

i guess from Tideman or Marcus S.  it *devalues* the results of close  
elections (because they could have just as well gone the other way)  
compared to decisive elections where we *know* that "the voters have  
spoken".  one dumb thing here continues to be this dumb Burlington  
political scene.  the anti-IRV crowd complained so much that Kiss (the  
Prog who won the IRV) had little mandate because, besides not having  
the plurality of 1st-choice votes (and he didn't have it with  
transferred votes until the very final round when he harvested most of  
the Dem votes), he only beat the GOP by 252 votes out of 9000.  then  
these people win the repeal of IRV by 303 votes out of about 7600.   
it's a little better, but these people have now claimed an eternal  
mandate from God for the traditional "single affirmative vote" ballot.

> Most methods don't even have a pairwise matrix, so do they
> just all flunk your test, and you "just cannot get past" any method
> besides margins? If not, I am curious where you find that other  
> methods
> have this kind of "salience."

i'll admit that i cannot get past the ranked-choice ballot (vs. the  
traditional vote-for-one, or the score ballot, or the approval ballot)  
and the Condorcet method of tabulating it.  i am less hung up on which  
Condorcet method, but, in the case of a cycle and given a choice, i  
can't see how decisiveness cannot be important.  if someone "wins" by  
just one or two votes (out of thousands), it says about the same thing  
as a tie or a loss.  the information we got from the voters is far  
less than that of a decisive defeat of another candidate.  it's the  
decisive defeat that should not have its result reversed in favor of  
the result of an indecisive defeat.

--

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."