[EM] Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting

[C.Benham]

On 10/16/2016 3:03 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> still seems that Condorcet -> Ranked Pairs -> Margins is the simplest, 
> mostly fair (doesn't deviate from Schulze-Margins) method to simply 
> adopt this principle: "When more voters mark their ballots that they 
> prefer Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters who 
> prefer the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected." 

Robert,

Take this example:

40: C
35: A>B
25: B

There is no Condorcet winner.   Margins (using Ranked Pairs, Schulze, 
River or MinMax) elects A.

Please take off your Pairwise-Margins glasses for a moment and put on 
your Common-sense Positional ones, and then tell us
how you would feel as a C supporter about C losing to A.

Electing A here is a failure of the "Plurality criterion" and a very bad 
failure of Later-no-Help (assuming that we don't elect A if the 35 A>B
had just voted A).

All Condorcet methods fail Later-no-Help, but in my view no acceptable 
method fails Plurality.  (IRV meets both Plurality and Later-no-Help).

http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Plurality_criterion

http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Later-no-help_criterion


>  Who can argue with that??  Whenever Candidate B is elected when more 
> of us wanted Candidate A or Candidate C or someone else, i mean WTF? 
>  how can anyone who believes in majority rule and one-person-one-vote 
> disagree with that?

Some people think that it is more important that the method meets 
Later-no-Help, and so isn't vulnerable to Burial strategy; or that the 
method
meets the Favorite  Betrayal Criterion and so has no order-reversal 
Compromise incentive.

But I nonetheless like compliance with the Condorcet criterion.

>  so i think, as long as we may leave the details about what to do 
> about cycles to a future debate, it's an acceptable semantic to use 
> the term "Condorcet method" or "Condorcet voting" in the discussion of 
> RCV.

That isn't very fair on IRV (aka RCV, aka Alternative Vote) because then 
the comparison is between (on the one hand) an actual method with some 
problems and
(on the other hand) a motherhood criterion (with a presumption that at 
some time in the future we'll discover some way of resolving cycles 
without any problems).

Chris  Benham

>
> ---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
> Subject: Re: [EM] Why I prefer ranked-choice voting to approval voting
> From: "C.Benham" <cbenham at adam.com.au>
> Date: Sat, October 15, 2016 11:01 am
> To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >
> >> I want to briefly address another form of ranked voting called
> >> Condorcet voting. Condorcet voting also uses a ranked ballot, but the
> >> votes are counted in a different way.
> >> While Condorcet voting is a great voting method, ...
> >
> > "Condorcet voting" isn't decisive enough to qualify as a "voting
> > method". Condorcet is just a criterion (or a category of methods that
> > meet the criterion).
> >
> > Min-Max Margins, Schulze (Winning Votes), Smith//Approval, "Benham"
> > (check for a CW among remaining candidates before each IRV-style
> > elimination)
> > are all very different methods that happen to meet the Condorcet 
> criterion.
>
> forgot Tideman (ranked-pairs).
>
> regarding semantics:  i think that it is loosely appropriate, in 
> discussion here and in discussion among the laity to use the term 
> "Condorcet method" or "Condorcet voting" as any of the 
> Condorcet-compliant methods for the sake of discussion to 
> differentiate ranked-choice methods from each other.  i.e. Condorcet 
> vs. IRV or Condorcet vs. Bucklin or Condorcet vs. Borda .  the 
> different Condorcet-compliant methods potentially differ in outcome 
> only when there is a cycle, which in real elections continues to 
> appear to be a rare occurrence.  not only that, at least when margins 
> are considered and there is only three candidates in the cycle, the 
> outcome of Schulze and Ranked Pairs and Min-Max appear to the same. 
>  so, as rare as cycles are, even rarer in the real world are cycles 
> with a Smith set of more than 3 candidates.  so i think, as long as we 
> may leave the details about what to do about cycles to a future 
> debate, it's an acceptable semantic to use the term "Condorcet method" 
> or "Condorcet voting" in the discussion of RCV.
>
> that said, i think *any* of these Condorcet methods are far better 
> than IRV because when IRV actually fails to elect the CW (which has 
> happened in reality in a governmental election in 2009), even if 
> voters don't know or understand exactly what went wrong, they know 
> **something** did and Ranked-Choice Voting (in general) is discredited 
> along with IRV.  so also are other voting reforms.  Fairvote doesn't 
> get it and even after the experience of 2009, they push IRV portraying 
> it as the *only* way of reform realizing RCV, which is explicitly 
> dishonest.  and they don't get it that somewhere, sometime again, they 
> will get a skeptical jurisdiction to adopt IRV and when it fails again 
> (which may well happen when there are three equally viable 
> candidates), IRV (and, by dishonest association, RCV) will be again 
> discredited.
>
> still seems that Condorcet -> Ranked Pairs -> Margins is the simplest, 
> mostly fair (doesn't deviate from Schulze-Margins) method to simply 
> adopt this principle: "When more voters mark their ballots that they 
> prefer Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters who 
> prefer the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected."  Who can argue 
> with that??  Whenever Candidate B is elected when more of us wanted 
> Candidate A or Candidate C or someone else, i mean WTF?  how can 
> anyone who believes in majority rule and one-person-one-vote disagree 
> with that?
>
>
> --
>
> r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
>
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>

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