[EM] margin vs winning votes

[C.Benham]

> voting your favorite sincerely as first choice instead of not voting 
> cannot make him lose while winning votes is the criteria.
> voting your favorite sincerely as first choice instead of not voting 
> can make him lose while margin is the criteria. 

Stephane,
I'd be interested in seeing that, because I think it's been shown that  
Mono-add-Top (the property you refer to) is incompatible
with Smith, which is met by Winning Votes using Schulze, Ranked Pairs or 
River.

Juho has promoted  MinMax(Margins), which does meet Mono-add-Top (and 
Condorcet).

http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Mono-add-top_criterion

Looking at this my claim in my first sentence might be slightly wrong.  
But Winning Votes meets both of  Condorcet and the
Plurality criterion, and (as it says on that page) Douglas Woodall has 
shown that it therefore can't meet Mono-add-Top.

MinMax(Margins) fails both of  Plurality and Smith.

BTW, I don't like either of  Winning Votes or Margins. Of the 
alternatives that are equivalent to both when all the voters give a
full strict ranking I think the best is  Losing Votes (erw). Ballots 
that equal-rank candidates  A and B both above at least one other
candidate are counted in the pairwise contest between A and B as giving 
a whole vote to each. Ballots that rank A and B equal-bottom
(or truncate A and B) count as zero to both in their pairwise contest. 
The method considers that the greater the number of votes
on the losing side, the weaker the pairwise defeat.

And not limiting ourselves to alternatives that are equivalent to 
Margins and Winning Votes (and Losing Votes) when all the voters
give a full strict ranking, I think better still is  "MinMax Losing 
Votes (erw) Margins", which I first suggested in April this year.

http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2014-April/097935.html

Chris  Benham



On 7/23/2014 11:24 AM, Stéphane Rouillon wrote:
> Hello,
>
> As I took the time to illustrate many years ago,
>
> voting your favorite sincerely as first choice instead of not voting 
> cannot make him lose while winning votes is the criteria.
> voting your favorite sincerely as first choice instead of not voting 
> can make him lose while margin is the criteria.
>
> An interesting property.
>
> S.Rouillon, still reading...
> PS: And Forest, I still use that Universal Preference Ballot !
>
> Le 2014-07-22 21:17, robert bristow-johnson a écrit :
>> On 7/22/14 7:11 PM, Forest Simmons wrote:
>>> Like Chris Benham, Kevin Venzke, and others I owe a lot to Mike 
>>> Ossipoff.
>>>
>>> He patiently explained difficult concepts by repeating the same 
>>> concepts in different words until reaching the simplest 
>>> formulation.  This was a tremendous help for me when I didn't see 
>>> the point of "winning votes" versus "margins" fourteen years ago 
>>> (for example).
>>
>> i still don't see the point.  a vote for your guy is +1, a vote for 
>> the other guy is -1, and a vote for neither counts for 0.
>>
>> whether is Schulze or Tideman or Kemeny–Young or Simpson-Kramer the 
>> disappointment of the losing voter counts as much (but in the other 
>> direction) as the satisfaction of the winning voter. vote margins are 
>> the product of the percent decisiveness times the vote turnout.  an 
>> pairwise election that's virtually tied with a huge turnout might not 
>> be as indicative of voter intent with a slightly lower turnout but a 
>> very decisive, creating a larger margin.
>>
>>> By asking the right questions and looking at political realities 
>>> (especially recently) he got us moving in the right direction.
>>>
>>> I always appreciated his passionate approach that might have seemed 
>>> overly combative to some people.
>>
>> it wasn't combative that was annoying.  if was being dismissive and 
>> patronizing.
>>
>> sorry to be a curmudgeon.
>>
>
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