[EM] STAR Challenge

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 28.06.2022 01:21, Forest Simmons wrote:

> So we see that in public elections this (Banks!) method reduces to the
> simple rule "Elect the lowest score candidate that defeats every higher
> score candidate," which is another formulation of Score,Benham as well
> as Ranked Pairs, River, and BeatPath,etc when defeat strength is
> measured by winning score.
> 
> Which of these equivalent formulations will be easiest to sell?
> 
> I mention Banks only to add prestige to the method, and to show how to
> generalize it to specialized, non-public elections that are likely to
> have more interesting Smith structure (twisted prism, etc).

Nice!

I would lean towards the Benham phrasing, but that's probably because
I've been considering how to tersely describe Benham lately:

"A candidate defeats another if the former is ranked (rated) ahead of
the latter on more ballots than vice versa.

A candidate is undefeated if nobody (still in the running) defeats him.

While there is no undefeated candidate, eliminate the Plurality (Range)
loser.

Elect the remaining undefeated candidate."

Of course, with the first two sentences staying the same, you could
replace the latter two sentences with:

"Elect the lowest score candidate that defeats every higher score
candidate",

which is shorter but not as close to the mechanical procedure.


If the jurisdiction is currently using Condorcet, or is the STAR method
is intended as a first step to Condorcet proper, then "just do RP but
with this defeat strength measure" might be more natural.

I guess you lose monotonicity because it's hard to get all of Banks,
monotonicity, and polynomial runtime.

-km