[EM] A modification to Condorcet so that one can vote against monsters.

[Dave Ketchum]

How do we identify a monster? Ŭalabio‽ seems to think they are  
identifiable.  I claim not - Ŭalabio‽ says they got excess ranking -  
we can see this after a race (deciding excess ranking identifies a  
monster - which even then is a problem only if the supposed monster  
got ranked by too many, but have no way to assign one as being a  
monster before a race.

Someone claims voters should rank all candidates.  I claim not -  
voters should rank those they recognize as being better than the  
collection of unranked.  Going beyond this imposes extra work on the  
voter, and risks mis-ranking those they do not have time to attend to  
better.

Condorcet counts a race between each pair of candidates, with counts  
as to which is better liked (ranked higher)..  The CW candidate wins  
each such race, while cycle members win most, but not all.

DWK

On Apr 14, 2012, at 10:59 AM, Michael Rouse wrote:

> On 4/14/2012 5:42 AM, Andrew Myers wrote:
>>
>> On 4/14/12 8:31 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>>> On 4/14/12 3:45 AM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
>>>> ¡Hello!
>>>>
>>>> ¿How fare you?
>>>>
>>>> It is tedious to rank hundreds of candidates, but sometimes  
>>>> monster is on the ballot and all unranked candidates are last. If  
>>>> the field is so polarized that the voters idiotically refuse to  
>>>> rank other serious candidates other than their candidate and the  
>>>> evil candidate has followers, the bad candidate might win. I  
>>>> suggest that Condorcet should have a dummy-candidate:
>>>>
>>>> 0 The ranked candidates.
>>>> 1 The unranked candidates.
>>>> 2 The dummy-canditate.
>>>> 3 The monsters.
>>>>
>>>> All unranked candidates have higher ranks than the monsters. One  
>>>> can then rank the monsters by how terrible they are.
>>>>
>>>> Basically, it is a way to vote against monsters in Condorcet  
>>>> without having to rank all of the hundreds of also-rans.
>>>
>>> all this is complicated crap that gunks up elections. it has an  
>>> ice-cube's chance in hell.
>>>
>> I've been observing experimentally how people use a Condorcet  
>> election system in practice over the past ten years (since 2003)  
>> and in fact the use of a dummy candidate to signal approval has  
>> become increasingly common. It seems to be intuitive, at least to  
>> web users, and effective. I do agree that trying to distinguish 0  
>> vs. 1 is probably overly complicated.
>>
>> -- Andrew 
>
> You could say "Rank all candidates you approve of" or even "List the  
> candidates you like in order of preference. Ignore all other  
> candidates." Such a ballot would be easier for the average voter to  
> understand and fill out. If there are fifteen people running for  
> office, and you like three, hate three, and don't know anything  
> about the remaining nine, you can just say the equivalent of A>B>C,  
> and ignore the rest. No dummy candidate would be necessary Sure, it  
> wouldn't give as much information as a ballot that has all of the  
> candidates ranked, but it would make certain forms of strategic  
> voting (such as burying) more tedious and less attractive.
>
> Then just use the ballots to find the Condorcet winner. Such a  
> ballot could be used with Approval-Completed Condorcet or Ranked  
> Approval Voting, or any other completion method that takes into  
> account  Approval votes. For example, you could say "If there is a  
> cycle, compare the two candidates with the lowest Approval score in  
> the cycle, and drop the pairwise loser. Continue until there is a  
> single winner." Or whatever.
>
> Mike Rouse
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