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

[Fred Gohlke]

Good Morning, Andy

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

re: "The voters' grades do matter.  If one voter changed his
      grade from D to B, then one more C vote falls down into
      the bottom half of the votes, so his tie-breaking value
      is 67199/155781 instead of 67198/155781, or 43.1368%
      instead of 43.1362%"

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.

Fred