[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[Juho Laatu]

On 26.5.2011, at 4.35, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> being that they choose the same winner in the case that there are only 3 candidates in the cycle, i would recommend Tideman over Schulze (sorry Marcus) for the simplicity of explanation.  while getting a Condorcet cycle is expected to be rare enough, how often in real elections in government, would you expect a situation where RP and CSSD will arrive at a different result?

If there are only few candidates and clear political agendas and clear differences between them, then cycles of 3 are probably much more common than cycles of 4. If there is a large number of quite equal candidates and no dominant or clear preference orders among the voters, then cycles of 4 and higher could be almost as common. In that case the differences between methods that differ only on cycles of 4 become relevant, maybe not very critical though. The choice between margins and winning votes could impact the results sooner. I guess Schulze is by default winning votes based. Ranked pairs maybe more margins oriented(?). But one could use either depending on one's preferences.

If you are looking for simplicity then maybe also minmax should be considered since it (the margins version) simply measures the number of required additional voters to beat all others. That is easy to explain, and also to visualize the results during the counting process (one should pay some attention also to this kind of real-time visualizations). It may pick also outside the top cycle in some extreme situations where the losses within the cycle are worse than the losses of some compromise candidate outside the cycle. Good or bad (to always respect the clone independence or to pick the least controversial winner), maybe a matter of taste.

Juho