[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 103, Issue 1

[Andy Jennings]

> Your response appears to be missing from the list.  I'll quote the
> paragraph I'm commenting on:
>

Oh.  You had emailed me off-list (yesterday) so I responded off-list.


The process you describe seems to be a rather complicated way of finding
> the top or bottom half of the votes.  The fact that 'B' is higher than 'D'
> and pushes a 'C' vote into the bottom half of the votes is nothing more
> than a Yes/No decision.  It helps you decide whether a candidate got more
> than one-half the votes, but is devoid of additional value.  A simple
> Yes/No ballot yields precisely that result with no mathematical constructs.
>
> If a voter grades a candidate as 'B' rather than 'A', the voter has
> detected some flaw in the candidate and is expressing it in the grade. To
> treat that voter's vote as simply above or below the median is to debase
> it.  Why should the voter take the trouble to assign a grade if it's only
> use is to place the vote in the higher or lower half of the votes cast?
>
> I'm sorry we disagree on this point, but if the grading system is to have
> significance in the electoral process, the higher ranks must be more
> valuable than the lower  ranks.


In this thread, I am only trying to clarify how MJ and CMJ work.  I have
not revealed my value judgments.

What I personally think about these systems is quite nuanced.  There are
things I like about them, things I find very mathematically interesting,
and things I don't like.

~ Andy
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