[EM] eliminate the plurality loser until there is a Condorcet winner

[Dave Ketchum]

On May 11, 2011, at 9:35 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> On May 11, 2011, at 3:51 PM, fsimmons at pcc.edu wrote:
>> James Green-Armytage asked
>>
>> Quick question for everyone: Do you happen to know when the method
>> described in the subject line (eliminate the plurality loser until
>> there is a Condorcet winner) was first proposed?

I get dizzy trying to sort this out and vote for forgetting most of it.

Those of us who agree that a Condorcet winner is a good thing should  
question wandering away from the X*X matrix that is the heart of this,  
and is enough to determine whether we have a CW, or have a cycle to  
decipher.

Each cycle member looks up only to other members for preventing that  
member from being CW - so that matrix is as far as we need to look to  
decide which is most deserving..

In this thread I see much labor wasted in going back to ballot data  
rather than reading what we need from the matrix.

> i was impressed with the bottom-two runoff (BTR) in that it's such a  
> small change to the existing IRV method used in a few places (and  
> used to be in my place).
>
> but i've been thinking that, while BTR or some other Condorcet  
> compliant IRV is better than a Condorcet non-compliant IRV, it's  
> still IRV and the actual method of tabulation does not allow for  
> precinct summability.  if you demand precinct summability (for  
> reasons of transparency in elections), then it really has to be a  
> simple Condorcet method where you count pairwise tallies locally,  
> post publicly and transmit upward the pairwise subtotals.  the  
> election should be decided solely by the totals from the pairwise  
> subtotals.  if Ranked Pairs or Schulze is used, the difference  
> between totals of a pair of candidates, the "defeat strength", is  
> part of the decision, but it is a derived value from the pairwise  
> totals.

Seems like what I wrote above.
>
>> Mike Ossipoff advised me to forget it, because (having been  
>> rebuffed himself
>> after proposing all of these ideas and more) he had found out by  
>> sad experience
>> that the hard core IRV supporters were too closed minded
>
> i *know* i loosened a few IRV supporters here in Burlington.  but,  
> unfortunately, the "Keep Voting Simple" side that brought us back to  
> Plurality and Delayed Runoff believe that God herself has ordained  
> the vote-for-only-one ballot.  we won't be revisiting anything with  
> a ranked ballot again in my lifetime.  i hope i'm wrong about that.
>
>> to even consider
>> anything other than pure Hare/STV/AV/IRV.  Since that time I have  
>> found a few
>> staunch IRV supporters that are willing to think about other  
>> possibilities, but
>> on the whole Mike seems to have been right.
>
> well, when a few more towns toss out IRV, i hope that FairVote gets  
> the message and starts promoting other tabulation methods than STV  
> with the ranked ballot.  what makes me so mad is that Burlington  
> people that are IRV supporters (because they are election reform  
> people and do not believe in the two-party religion), these people  
> had no idea that there was another way to look at those very same  
> ballots.  Fairvote essentially sold ranked-choice voting with IRV as  
> if they were the same thing.  as if there *is* no ranked-choice  
> voting without IRV.

And we need to do better educating.

Dave Ketchum
> --
> r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."