[EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?

[Jameson Quinn]

2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant <benn at 4efix.com>

> It occurred to me that the reason we are failing the Participation
> Criteria with Bucklin in the below example:****
>
> ** **
>
> 49: X:1st   Y:4th****
>
> 50: X:5th   Y:4th****
>
> Y wins.****
>
> ** **
>
> Now we add two votes:****
>
> 2: X:3rd   Y:2nd****
>
> X wins.****
>
> ** **
>
> is because we are letting people skip grades/places.  Or to put another
> way, if we asked the voters under Bucklin to fill out each ballot more
> strictly, ranking 1st through Nth where there are N candidates – I know
> that several do not like this approach, **but** my question is this –
> does **strictly ranked** Bucklin fail Participation??
>

Yes. Just add 500 other candidates, and fill in the gaps with
randomly-selected candidates from the 500. Obviously, you could probably
get by with a lot less than 500 — at a rough guess, I'd expect that 8 would
be plenty without changing the numbers here, and probably around 4-6 would
be enough to make a similar example with smaller gaps work, but my point is
that with enough extra candidates who cluster at the bottom of most
ballots, you can turn any rated scenario into a ranked scenario.

You are being tempted by a mirage here. The first lesson of "voting school
kindergarten" is that most problems don't have a perfect solution. That
doesn't mean you stop looking for ways to improve things, but it does mean
that when you imagine a "fix", you do your best to shoot holes in your own
idea. 95% of the time you'll succeed, but the other 5% still makes it worth
it.

Jameson
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