[EM] Comprehensive, Simple, and Informative Indicative Voting Method:: MJ is best

[steve bosworth]

Originally, Gervase Lam suggested that Approval style voting could be used in Brexit Vote in Parliament.  My response was to suggest instead that Majority Judgment (MJ) provides the most Comprehensive, Simple, and  Informative Indicative Voting Method. Please see below a more detailed explanation of how MJ works.

I'm surprised that no-one has addressed my exact suggestion that Majority Judgment (MJ) would seem to provide a superior method.



Instead, SCORE voting, using 0—100 was suggested by William.  This suggestion does not take into account that most people cannot distinguish between more than about 7 levels of desired human behavior. Balinski & Laraki discuss this (pp.171, 169, 283, 306, 310, & 389) with regard to G.A. Miller’s 1956 article: The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63: 89-97.  This is why MJ’s use of only 6 grades from Excellent to Reject are more meaningful and discerning.  Also, these grades are more meaningful than numbers 1—6.  At the same time, unlike MJ, APPROVAL and SCORE would not guarantee the discovery of a BREXIT option that is supported by an absolute majority of all the voters' highest grades.

Please give any of your criticisms of MJ in this regard.

From: steve bosworth <stevebosworth at hotmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 6:24 AM
To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
Subject: Comprehensive, simplist, and most informative Indicative Voting



Yes, Approval would work, but unlike Majority Judgment (Balinski & Laraki, Majority Judgment (2010, MIT) Approval does not guarantee finding the option most supported by an absolute majority, nor would it inform us how highly all the MPs grade each of the options.

Majority Judgment would allow the Commons to decide on one of the many options by an absolute majority as a result of counting one ballot from each of the MPs.  Each MP is simply asked to “grade” as many of the options listed as either Excellent (ideal), Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Poor, or “Reject”.  Each option not explicitly graded is counted as “Reject” by that voter.  The same grade can be given to more than one choice.

As a result, all the options will have received the same number of grades, but a different set.  The winner is the choice that has received an absolute majority of grades that are equal to, or higher than, the highest median-grade given to any of the choices.

The median-grade of each option is found as follows:

•  Place all the grades, high to low, top to bottom, in side-by-side columns, the name of each option at the top of each of these columns.

•  The median-grade for each option is the grade located half way down each column (i.e. in the middle if there is an odd number of voters, the lower middle if the number is even).

If more than one option has the same highest median-grade, the MJ winner is discovered by removing (one-by-one) any grades equal in value to this grade from each tied option’s total until only one is currently found to retain the highest remaining median-grade.

Also in contrast to ranking the options, the above Majority Judgment method does not eliminate any option before the Absolute Majority winner is discovered.  Therefore, only Majority Judgment would guarantee that a majority winner would be found.


What do you think?

Steve

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