[EM] re Burlington

[Juho Laatu]

> It is easiest to understand this if all voters truncate, effectively equal-ranking all but one bottom.

I guess Condorcet and most methods resemble plurality if voters so want. In most methods they can just bullet vote and leave the rest of the information out.

> In traditional voting, before modern elections, no decision was made unless a majority supported it.

One could try to reach majority by making voting mandatory. Or if majority of those that vote is enough, then one could make filling the ballot paper appropriately mandatory. This covers both the first round and the runoff.

How abut trying to solve this problem in Condorcet by introducing a "status quo" candidate in the election? If that candidate wins, then the election is declared inconclusive. Or alternatively people have decided to keep the status quo. If needed, one could arrange a second round where people would know better which candidates to rank.

One interesting question here is, what is the default position of the "status quo" candidate. It could be shared last, as with other candidates, but one could also think it would be "lonely last" behind others, or first position.

Juho


P.S. I wonder also if there would be need for a second additional candidate. That threshold could be e.g. "no way worse than this, I'm serious about keeping the status quo" :-). Candidates that lose to that threshold could e.g. be excluded from the second round (if "status quo" won the first round).


> On 31 May 2019, at 02:01, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> 
> Nearly all voters can vote against a candidate, be unwilling to accept that candidate as a winner, and the candidate can still be a Cordorcet winner. This becomes more possible as the candidate set enlarges.
> 
> It is easiest to understand this if all voters truncate, effectively equal-ranking all but one bottom.
> 
> Simple example: two voters prefer a single candidate over all others. All other voters are divided, voting only to prefer their own favorite, each one different. So in every pairwise race, the candidate wins. Condorcet is an interesting criterion, but is far from the whole of what is desirable.
> 
> In traditional voting, before modern elections, no decision was made unless a majority supported it. Plurality elections discarded that principle in the interest of efficiency, which I have been pointing out is fascist. If a Condorcet method tests approval of results, and requires a majority approving to complete the election, it can avoid the problem, but at the risk of failing to complete. It has been common to accept the need for "runoff elections." That could be drastically improved by using advanced election methods for both elections, and using much more intelligent methods of selecting candidates for a runoff. With advanced methods, a Condorcet winner in the primary would always advance to the runoff and the issue would be the other one or two. And then, again, having approval indication, what should happen if no candidate gains majority approval in the runoff? I classic democracy, they simply kept on voting until they had majority approval of an outcome.
> 
> On 5/20/2019 2:52 PM, Richard Lung wrote:
>> "But it is only Condorcet that elects the candidate that is explicitly preferred by voters over every other candidate."
>> 
>> I wonder tho, whether that satisfies the requiremant for one candidate (of their number) to be prefered over a whole range of candidates?
>> 
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info