[EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet

[Juho Laatu]

I just note that there are many approaches to making the pairwise comparisons.

- One could use proportions instead of margins => A/B isntead of A-B.

- If one measures the number of poeple who took position, one would have to know which ones voted for a tie intentionally, and which ones voted for a tie because they thought those candidates were already irrelevat, or because they didn't know the candidates, or were just too lazy to mark all the details in the ballot. An wlternative would be to assume that any tie is interpreted as an intentionally marked tie. A candidate taht is not known by many voters probably will not be ranked high anyway, so there may be no need for adjustments.

- Winning votes counts the amount of opposition, but doesn't care about the amount of support.

- Also other more fine-tuned approaches to making the pairwise comparisons could be developed. Or maybe rough and simple rules are easier to justify.

- Truncation as a way to make the results of the truncated candidates worse is not a nice option because it may lead to people not ranking the candidates, which is contrary to the targets of ranked voting (= collect all preference opinions). The worst case would be bullet voting.

Juho


On 1.10.2012, at 23.52, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> On 10/01/2012 08:50 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> 
>> the reason i like margins over winning votes is that the margin, in vote
>> count, is the product of the margin as a percent (that would be a
>> measure of the decisiveness of the electorate) times the total number of
>> votes (which is a measure of how important the election is). so the
>> margin in votes is the product of salience of the race times how
>> decisive the decision is.
> 
> Similarly, one might say that wv is more about the degree of contention about something than the margin of victory. If most people have no opinion about A vs B, but 10 people vote A ahead of B, then that, according to wv, is less important than if, out of a million, ten more people vote A ahead of B than B ahead of A. In the latter case, the contest draws significant attention; in the former, it doesn't.
> 
> It's a bit like polling. Say you poll a thousand voters and 990 of them decline to answer. Then that ten answer in favor of A isn't going to carry much weight in favor of A; but if all thousand answer and 510 are in favor of A, that's quite a bit more important.
> 
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