[EM] Irrelevant Ballots

[Toby Pereira]

Thank you for the clarification. Would you also consider ballots that rank/rate candidates equally to be irrelevant? For example, if A and B are the clear frontrunners anyway, and a ballot top rates or equal top ranks both candidates and doesn't mention any other candidates, would this be an irrelevant ballot?

 
      From: C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au>
 To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com 
 Sent: Wednesday, 9 November 2016, 5:28
 Subject: Re: [EM] Irrelevant Ballots
   
 Toby,
 
 A while ago some-one coined the "Blank Ballots Criterion" that just said that the result shouldn't change if we add (or remove) some
 "blank ballots".
 
 But it struck me that a method that breaches this in spirit would usually meet the letter of it by simply refusing to count such ballots
 as "valid".
 
 So I coined "Irrelevant Ballots Independence" that just said that if we add some ballots that do nothing but plump for some candidate 
 with fewer above-bottom votes than any other candidate and that is ignored or not voted above bottom on all the other ballots then
 the result shouldn't change.
 
 It is failed by Bucklin and tends to be failed by methods that use arbitrary percentage thresholds of all the valid ballots as part of their
 algorithms.
 
 Chris Benham
 
 
 On 11/9/2016 8:20 AM, Toby Pereira wrote:
  
  I've noticed people (mainly Chris Benham I think) talking about "irrelevant ballots", and I just wanted to clear up the definition that people use. My intuitive understanding is that a ballot is irrelevant with respect to candidates A and B if it ranks/rates them equally or doesn't rank/rate them at all. So if A is  elected over B then the addition or removal of any such ballots would never cause B to be elected over A. 
  
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