[EM] Universality of top-count-conditionality. MTAOC alone. Stepwise-When-Necessary. Conditional in Condorcet?

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I abbreviate Middle-When-Necessary as MWN.

Though, as I've mentioned, mutuality-conditionality a la MTAOC pseudocode, and by MMT, and by GMAT are all (it seems to me)
mutually incompatible as options in an Approval election, conditionality by top-count is compatible with each one of those, as
options offerable together in an Approval election.

If, as seems to me now, it doesn't make sense to speak of MTAOC and MCAOC as voting options in an Approval election, then
it could be more worthwhile for them to be considered by an initiative committee, when choosing its proposal. Most likely
AOC would be a better proposal, though, if anything more complicated than plain Approval is proposed, due to AOC's greater
simplicity.

The other day I proposed Middle-When-Necessary, a 3-slot voting option for an Approval election.

It's a special case of Stepwise-When-Necessary:

Stepwise-When-Necessary:

Unlimited rankings.

Each ballot gives a vote to each of its top-ranked candidate(s).

A count is done for each rank position, starting with 1st place. A count is won by its biggest votegetter.

Any ballot all of whose top-ranked candidates are not currently winners gives a vote to its candidate(s) at the next
rank position, and a count is conducted. 

That is repeated till there are no ballots that have a next rank position to give to. The winner then is the candidate with the
most votes.

Of course it could just turn out as an Approval count.

Advantage over plain Approval voting: If your upper choices are sufficiently popular, the victory chance of one of them is helped
by the fact that you won't have yet given votes to any less liked.

A disadvantage in comparison to Approval is that the strategy isn't known as precisely.

I don't claim great improvement for Stepwise-When-Necessary (SWN) over plain Approval voting, but the use of that option seems at least
a little advantageous.

For methods of more than 3 slots, conditionality-by-top-count could, and probably should, be replaced by
conditionality-by-current-vote-total. The candidate gets your vote only if s/he currently has more votes than
any of your top-ranked candidates.

Maybe Condorcet could have an option, for any particular rank position, to make the listing of a candidate there
conditional, where that conditionality is implemented by the ways that I've described.

For instance, if instead of Approval or top-count, Improved Condorcet were completed in winning-votes sort of way,
and conditionality could be specified for any rank-listing of a candidate, it could be called ICWOC  (Improved Condorcet winning-votes
Optional Conditional)

I haven't thoroughly looked at that possibility, of course, and, at this point, it's just speculative.

If it works, its advantage over ICT could be somewhat better burial-deterrence. ...at the cost of loss of simplicity.

Pairwise count methods are all subject to strategy that the conditional Approval options and MTAOC and MCAOC aren't
subject to. Additionally, they're farther from the simple and natural first proposal, Approval.

Mike Ossipoff




 		 	   		  
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