[EM] Associated Student Government at Northwestern University uses Schulze Method

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 04/20/2013 10:32 PM, rbj at audioimagination.com wrote:
>
> From: "Kevin Venzke" <stepjak at yahoo.fr>
>
>  > It's true that *with the ballots as cast* any Condorcet-compliant
> method would have
>  > worked identically.
>
> including no specific Condorcet method, since there was a CW.
>
>  > What you don't know until you try it, is whether voters would
>  > actually cast those ballots, given the incentives created by the method.
>
> well, when at first i (mistakenly) thought that there were only 3
> candidates (or candidate tickets, in this case), i could not see how
> there would be any different outcome at all because, even if there was a
> cycle, it would be a cycle with 3 in the Smith set.

I think his point was that the criterion compliances of the method might 
induce certain behavior that would not be in place with another method.

As a very drastic example, consider a Condorcet election where the CW is 
also the Plurality winner *given those ballots*. Strictly, one could 
argue that Plurality would have sufficed and would have produced the 
same winner - but the significant vote-splitting problems of Plurality 
might have led to a lesser-of-two-evils thinking and so the winner would 
have changed under the ballots that the voters would have submitted in 
Plurality.

On the other hand, one could also argue that there's too little 
difference between various Condorcet methods for this to happen. That 
is, the overwhelming majority of Condorcet elections in practice end 
with a CW, so the difference between Schulze and Copeland (or 
Borda-elimination) is so small one should just pick whichever the 
electorate will accept.

I don't know whether that is true or not - one would have to gather 
evidence to say either way - but in the absence of such, I prefer 
advanced Condorcet methods just to be on the safe side (or if the 
electorate learns to make use of the safety provided by them, they can 
comparably speaking be more expressive before being limited by the 
method). But if the voters absolutely won't accept the advanced methods, 
simple ones are better than Plurality.