[EM] Defeat Strength

[James Gilmour]

In an STV-PR election (a.k.a. RCV), the voter's second and any subsequent preferences are contingency choices, to be used only in
the contingency that the voter's first choice candidate cannot be elected (because of lack of support) or has already been elected
to represent a full quota of voters (and so does not need the additional support).

Where a voter does not mark a preference against every candidate, that voter is telling the Returning Officer that he or she has no
preference among the unmarked candidates, and that if any choice has to be made among those candidates, he or she is happy to leave
that decision to those voters who do have preferences among those candidates.  Unmarked preferences mean nothing more than "I have
opted out at this point and leave any further decisions to others".

James Gilmour
Edinburgh, Scotland


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Election-Methods [mailto:election-methods-bounces at lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of robert bristow-johnson
> Sent: 09 September 2022 16:59
> To: EM <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] Defeat Strength
> 
> > On 09/09/2022 11:34 AM EDT Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > As I understand it, the custom of treating truncation/abstention the same as equal last rank is a practical expedient to ward
off dark horse upsets.
> >
> But it's also just equivalent to the meaning of the ballot in a Hare RCV (or "IRV") election.  Any unranked candidate is treated
exactly as if they were ranked at the bottom level in the single transferable vote model.  I would not like to see that meaning
changed with an RCV election decided with different rules.  In other words, I would not want to see the meaning of an unranked
candidate to be changed so that somehow the unranked candidate is seen as preferred over any ranked candidate.
> 
> r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info