[EM] Ordering defeats in Minimax

[Markus Schulze]

Hallo,

Darlington's paper ("Minimax is the Best Electoral System
After All") is very interesting:

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1606/1606.04371.pdf

There are many papers where some author makes presumptions
about the distribution of the voters and the candidates,
about the used strategies, about how the performance of an
election method is measured in concrete test cases, etc..
The author then proves that his favorite election method
performs better than every other known election method.

However, this is not surprising. The purpose of an
election method is to find the best candidate according
to some heuristic. So you can always use test cases where
this election method's heuristic happens to be met exactly
and then claim that you have proven with random simulations
that your favorite method is the best.

Therefore, a more interesting question is which election
method performs the second best. Here, Darlington writes
that the Schulze method performs the second best, only
slightly worse than his favorite method.

Markus Schulze