[EM] Retiring from voting systems, quitting EM

[Daniel Bishop]

On Wed, 2014-07-23 at 10:22 +0100, Kevin Venzke wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> 
> 
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> De : robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com>
> À : election-methods at lists.electorama.com 
> Envoyé le : Mardi 22 juillet 2014 20h17
> Objet : Re: [EM] Retiring from voting systems, quitting EM
> 
> 
> 
>         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.
> 
> 
> Those of us who don't like margins tend to focus on strategic
> implications 
> more than on the philosophy behind it. That said, it bothers me that
> (given
> that there is only one seat to win) many voters won't want their
> candidates
> to win their contests. For example the supporters of a
> not-really-contending
> Far Left candidate get no benefit when a Far Left>Center Left contest
> 
> is respected, if the real result is that Center Left>Right is
> overturned with
> the election going to Right.
> 
> 
> I would rather look at what happens in the end and what could
> have happened
> if people had voted differently. For example in this case I see that
> the 
> presence of Far Left evidently threw the election to Right, so that
> next time
> Far Left voters might compromise, or the Far Left
> candidate might decide
> (or be pressured) not to run again. Whereas, if Left had simply been
> elected
> in the first place, I don't see anyone who would then wish that they
> had voted
> in some other way.
> 
> 
> WV is more to my taste here because the raw "winning votes" you can 
> command correlates pretty well with your viability as a candidate.
> Minor
> candidates' wins don't stick, making it safer to vote for them.
> 
WV is not without its disadvantages.  Consider, for example (thanks to
Juho Laatu), the election

50: A>B
50: C>D

This could happen in an alternate US history in which the 12th Amendment
introduced Condorcet voting to the Electoral College instead of
separating the presidential and VP ballots.  A and C would be the
presidential candidates, and B and D their respective running mates.

Four of the six pairwise contests (A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D) are 50-50 ties,
and the other two (A>B, C>D) are 50-0 landslides.  This is unsurprising
considering that *nobody* voted B>A or D>C.

But consider what happens if just one B>D vote is added.  This creates
an A>B>C>D>A Condorcet cycle.  I shall assume the Tideman method will be
used to break it, but I believe that Schulze gives the same results.

Under WV, the co-strongest defeats are B>C, B>D, and D>A, with 51 votes
each.  They do not contradict each other, so we can lock all three of
them.  This reduces the 24 possible orderings of candidates to three
(B>C>D>A, B>D>A>C, B>D>C>A), all of which have B as the winner.  IOW, a
single elector can turn a tied presidential election into a victory for
one of the *vice*-presidential candidates!  How does this make any
sense?!

Under Margins, however, the strongest victories are A>B and C>D (with a
net of 49 votes each).  After that point, it's ambiguous whether A or C
wins, but that's what we'd expect.  B would need another 50 votes in
order to win the election.