[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 187, Issue 27

[steve bosworth]

________________________________
From: Election-Methods <election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com> on behalf of election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com <election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2020 2:40 PM
To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
Subject: Election-Methods Digest, Vol 187, Issue 27

Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Is there a standard way of defining "runner-up" in the
      context of single winner elections? (Forest Simmons)
   2. Re: Is there a standard way of defining "runner-up" in the
      context of single winner elections? (Greg Dennis)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1

>From Steve,
Below, Forest states that
*But what I'm looking for is in the limited context of a single winner
election how o we decide who came closest to beating the actual winner?  In
other words, who turned out to be the greatest rival of the winner for the
single seat of a single winner election?*

As far as I can see, Balinski's Majority Judgment (MJ) provides the best and simplest answer to this question.  Unlike any alternative method of which I'm aware, MJ firstly guarantees that the winner will be the candidate who has received an absolute majority of all the votes that grade that candidate most fit for the office.  The runner-up would be the next candidate who receives such a majority.  I explained this in more detail as follows:

Balinski and Laraki  cogently argue (Majority Judgment (2010/2011 MIT) that rather than asking citizens to rank, score, or mark candidates in some other way, they should evaluate (or grade) them. To do this, citizens more comfortably and conveniently grade each candidate’s fitness for office as either Excellent (ideal), Very Good, Good, Acceptable, Poor, or Reject (entirely unsuitable). These grades let voters more discerningly express meaningful and informative choices than those offered by preferences, numeric scores, Xs or ticks.  Grading makes it more likely that the highest quality candidates available will be elected: mayor, governor, or president.

Each candidate who is not explicitly graded is counted as Reject by that voter. As a result, all candidates have the same number of evaluations but a different set of grades received from the voters. The Majority Judgment (MJ) winner is the one who has received grades from an absolute majority of all the voters that are equal to, or higher than, the highest median grade given to any candidate. This median grade can be found as follows:

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

  2.  The median grade for each candidate is the grade located half-way down each column, in the middle if there is an odd number of voters, or in the lower middle if the number is even.

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

What do you think?

Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 13:26:48 -0800
From: Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu>
To: VoteFair <electionmethods at votefair.org>,  EM
        <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] Is there a standard way of defining "runner-up" in
        the context of single winner elections?
Message-ID:
        <CAP29one=RjB2HL-eyUctuyC2BBjvyrkjafQqucPPVwRi0GcR6g at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Richard,

Thanks for your enthusiastic reply.  I think it is a very good idea in the
general context of "how do we define second choice?"

But what I'm looking for is in the limited context of a single winner
election how o we decide who came closest to beating the actual winner?  In
other words, who turned out to be the greatest rival of the winner for the
single seat of a single winner election?

We're not saying that this greatest rival should be the next candidate to
be seated in a multi-winner election.

For example. in an approval election the candidate with the second greatest
approval would be the chief rival of the approval winner by any reasonable
standard, but would probably not be the winner of the next round in the
multi-winner context because voters who approved this runner-up would have
the weight of their ballots cut in half for the second round.

So it's not exactly what I was looking for, but very good related
information!


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20200126/a7ed0058/attachment.html>