[EM] Copeland//Plurality --- can it beat IRV?

[Richard Lung]

Dear All,

There is compelling reason why electoral reformers in the USA are promoting IRV. Firstly the monarchist mind-set on single districts, apparently shared as much in this group, as in American society, as a whole. 
To the credit of Voter Choice Massachusetts, they see STV as a continuation of IRV. Multi-member constituencies are more important for democracy, as distinct from minimally democratic IRV or other single member systems.

A science cannot depend solely on mathematics (as was suggested in the nineties of string theory). That is just rationalistic scholasticism. Robert Heinlein, in one of his stories, said there are only mathematicians and peasants. If so, the scientific role of the earth-bound is under-rated. 
Comment is free but facts are sacred. The fact is that STV, which has in common with IRV, premature exclusion of candidates, never the less, produces the election, mainly of first or high preferences. It may be non-monotonic, technically, but it is in fact a reliable system.

In my system of electoral thought, conventional STV (including Meek method)
Is zero order binomial stv. That is because it has only one of two rational terms, election count and exclusion count. That description is not meant to be a put-down: it is saying that traditional stv is not so much wrong, as the beginning of an approximation in counting.

My hand counts in binomial stv are just first order binomial stv: one rational election count combined with one rational exclusion count. Conventional stv has only one rational count; is a rationally uninomial count. And that is combined with merely an ordinal Last Past The Post exclusion count.

Binomial stv has greater continuity between single and multi-member districts, than IRV has with STV. This is because binomial stv puts Gregory method in the form of keep values, and, unlike Gregory method, keep values can be used for single districts as well as multiple seats per constituency.

Regards,
Richard Lung.



On 28 Jan 2022, at 12:53 pm, Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

I think the problem with these long threads is that there are rarely concluding thoughts at the end, so unless you're following very closely, you might miss the best stuff. Understandably people post stuff as it comes to them, so you get people's "stream of consciousness", but I think it would be good if, once a discussion is dying down, the main contributors then posted a summary of their overall thoughts and findings, and which things they would take forward.

Toby

On Friday, 28 January 2022, 09:12:17 GMT, Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> wrote:


On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 10:06 PM Forest Simmons
<forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The name might be "Gross Loser Elimination"
>
> The Gross Loser is the candidate that comes closest to being skunked in a pairwise matchup.

Ew, ick, what a gross loser!  EWWW-W-W-W-W-W!  :-D

I only have a cursory idea what y'all are talking about (and don't
bother trying to explain it; I may go back and do more than skim the
messages at some point, but I don't have the mental energy to spend on
this right now).

Regardless, I would love all of your help (everyone on EM-list) in
making electowiki more accessible to people new to electoral reform.
I think it's cool that Forest is trying to come up with names for this
new method that sounds marketable (sorta like "Ranked Robin").
However, my fear is that more names for minor variants of Llull's
method <https://electowiki.org/wiki/Lllull's_method>) is just going to
confuse people, given that Llull/Condorcet/Copeland has been around
for a while and yet hasn't taken the world by storm.

It could be that I need to study some more in order to participate in
this mailing list.  It's been a long, long time since I've truly
wrapped my brain around linear algebra (which .... I didn't do very
well in that subject my first time around).  I suppose I should
probably watch enough YouTube videos such that I've had enough of a
refresher in that topic to where I can follow the topic as fluidly as
you all seem to follow the discussions.

Regardless, we could use more editors helping us on electowiki, and
less voting method criteria or new methods to sort, because we're not
even CLOSE to sorting out everything that other editors have dumped on
electowiki over the past fifteen years or so.  By "help", I should be
clear: we need people looking at existing articles with fresh eyes,
and improving them so that people new to electoral reform can
understand them.  Let's make them as approachable as "Good Articles"
on English Wikipedia (which have a specific meaning:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles>)

Since I'm threadjacking, I'll finish by actually addressing Dr.
Carerra's original suggestion.  Because I've been on this mailing list
for so long, I understand what "Copeland//Plurality" means (and I like
the idea of exploring that chain of methods for criterion compliance).
For those of us that like the Condorcet-winner criterion (CWC), some
sort of Copeland hybrid seems like a promising path toward an
explainable CWC system.

Rob
p.s. sorry if this email seems like I'm picking on either of you in
particular (Dr. Daniel Carrera or [TitleUnknown] Forest Simmons).  I
just saw "gross loser" and it triggered the smartass in me, which then
provided me an entry point to speak to everyone active in this thread.

p.p.s.  In reviewing before hitting "send", I realized I should read
more of the thread.  I see now that y'all are talking about something
which MIGHT be better than BTR-IRV, and in general, I really like
Condorcet-winner-compliant alternatives to IRV that might be simple
enough to get people to rally behind.  Riffing off of Copeland seems
promising, because sports junkies generally don't have an issue with
Win-Loss-Tie standings, and I think the Copeland-esque view of
Burlington 2009 election provides the clearest view of the unfairness
of what happened:
<https://electowiki.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election#Pairwise_results>

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