[EM] "we only get one shot" (Re: RCV Challenge)

[Richard Lung]

KM,
There is, I believe, a deep answer to your question, which is the one that occurs to me first, happily or unhappily.
That is, there is a structure of measurement, that is always with us, but we are only more or less aware of it. (We might borrow the term "deep structure" off Noam Chomsky.) 
Any election system would thus be judged by how aware it is of this measurement structure. To take an example of minimal awareness, Congress gerrymandering, say "sweetheart gerrymandering", to use the technical term for a Republican and Democrat senator, who collude to make their district boundaries safe seats for each other.
Barack Obama refered to this malpractise in his closing state of the union address. It was to the effect that voters should choose their representatives, instead of representatives choosing their voters.
The point is that this gerrymandering is both an "election" and "exclusion" process - carried out by a hand-full of politicians, instead of the nation. It is still a transferable vote, not conducted by the Hare system, for the populace, but by the gerrymanderers for themselves.

In good science generally, including the Hare system, a common structure of measurement is evident. In bad science, like gerrymandering, the structure is stunted almost beyond recognition.

Regards,
Richard Lung.

PS. Yes, classificatory scale sometimes called the nominal scale.



On 6 Jan 2022, at 10:30 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:

> On 06.01.2022 20:52, Richard Lung wrote:
> 
> KM, Fair enough.
> 
> Where a voting methods exclusion count rates on the scales of
> measurement should be some indication.
> 
> I refer to the measurement scales given by SS Stevens, in the journal,
> Science: classificatory; ordinal; interval; ratio, in order of
> increasing power of measurement.

Okay, I think I see what you mean by different types of scales. But how
do I determine whether some election method that's provided to me (as an
algorithm) has an exclusion count at all? What does it mean for a method
to have an exclusion count?

(BTW, I know the classificatory scale as the nominal or categorical
scale. There are probably other names, too.)

-km