[EM] Condorcet Meeting: Narrowing the Field

[C.Benham]

Forest,

I think we are imagining different real world scenarios here as well as 
having different philosophical attitudes.

I have in mind say a country's presidential election with the primary 
being held well before the final, with very many candidates (say in the 
tens)
and with most of the voters knowing nothing or next to nothing about 
most of the candidates.

The purpose of the primary then is just to weed out candidates with 
insignificant core support to reduce the field to a "manageable" size and to
reduce the amount of research serious voters need to do to give an 
adequately informed vote.

Candidates who do very poorly in this primary scenario have the 
potential to win a strong following in the course of the relatively long 
campaign
period between the primary and the final election.

So I'm not happy with complicated Condorcet-ish rules for the primary 
that are too similar to the method used for the final election. I see no 
reason
why the primary "Condorcet loser" shouldn't be on the finals ballot if 
he/she is serious and has some low threshold of core supporters.

Also I don't like the idea of possibly strategic and/or bigoted voters 
having a say about the finals ballot-access of candidates they hate 
without any
possible cost or risk to candidates they support.

One of the things I like about my IRV last N idea is that the ballot 
rules are very similar to what I think should be used for the final 
election (maybe not
quite identical because for the primary I'm not in favour of allowing 
above-bottom equal-ranking or an explicit approval cutoff).

Chris Benham


On 1/09/2023 4:21 am, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Could the Implicit Approval winner ever be a Condorcet loser?
>
> Highly unlikely, especially in the context of too many candidates, 
> etc. But if so, every other candidate would have a short beatpath to 
> it ... so no narrowing of the field would occur.
>
> So it would be better to use the IRV winner or the MaxMax Pairwise 
> Support winner as the short beatpath target ... the winner of the 
> simplest method that satisfies the Condorcet Loser Criterion.
>
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 11:30 PM Forest Simmons 
> <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Voters strictly rank as many candidates as they care to.
>
>     The implicit it approval of a candidate is the number of ballots
>     on which it out ranks at least one other candidate.
>
>     Let S be the set of candidates tied for most implicit approval.
>
>     A candidate will advance to the final ballot if and only if it has
>     a beatpath of two or fewer steps to some member of S.
>
>     fws
>
>
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