[EM] Simple Tournament Proposal

[Richard Lung]

The superiority of sport to politics is that sports have independent 
referees. Referees have rules of independence unlike many referendums. 
In the US city referendums, the Machine, such as Tammany Hall in New 
York and about 20 American cities used referendums as battering rams to 
reinstate monopolistic elections against proportional representation 
with a single transferable vote. Likewise Britain has no referendum 
rules and is fine with money and publicity deciding the issue.

Paddy Ashdown, former Liberal Democrat leader, said of the 2011 
Alternative Vote referendum: "They marshalled a regiment of lies." And 
IRV is still monopolistic, despite the ranked choice vote. It's a basc 
principle of scientific investigation not to prejudge what one is 
supposed to prove. A representative sample of self-informing public 
opinion, a Citizens Assembly, can be a referee. As it was in British 
Columbia, with independence rules, before the politicians lost 
self-restraint and rigged the referendum rules, with a one and a half 
votes weighting in favor of FPTP (double 60% thresholds).

The relevance of all this, in case you're wondering, is that there is no 
authoritative "standard model" of elections, as there is a standard 
model in physics, despite its acknowledged imperfections. Therefore, it 
follows that election implementation is not the decision of experts, as 
it would be, regarding phyics or biology, for instance, but has to have 
the crude fall-back of referee devices like a Citizens Assembly, which 
reformers in Canada widely seem to recognise.

Regards,

Richard Lung.


On 22/03/2023 04:00, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Here's my suggestion for choice of tournament champion:
>
> Lacking an undefeated team, elect the pairwise victor of the defensive 
> and offensive champs.
>
> In the sports context the natural choices of offensive and defensive 
> champs, respectively are the team with the greatest point total, and 
> the team with the smallest opposing team points total, both totalled 
> for the entire tournament.
>
> In the election context the natural choices of offensive and defensive 
> champs, respectively, are the candidate with the greatest vote total, 
> and the candidate with the smallest opposing vote total ... noth 
> totalled for all of the direct democratic matchups between pairs of 
> candidates.
>
> However, in the context of elections the presence of clone candidates 
> will unfairly distort these results. This distortion is easily 
> overcome by the following modification:
>
> The Offensive Champ is the candidate that can honestly say "everybody 
> else had a matchup where they got fewer votes than I did in my worst 
> matchup."
>
> The Defensive Champ is the candidate that can honestly boast, "Every 
> other candidate had a matchup where their opponent got more votes than 
> mine did in my worst matchup."
>
> How do we get the matchup votes for candidates X and Y in their direct 
> democratic compsrison?
>
> They are simply the transferred votes that they would have if all of 
> the other candidates were eliminated.
>
> Candidate X would get one vote from every ballot on which X is ranked 
> ahead of Y.
>
> Similarly, Y's vote total in this contest is the number of ballots 
> that rank Y ahead of X.
>
> Now, some technical notes for the election technicians ... everybody 
> else thanked with heartfelt appreciation for their participation ... 
> and excused:
>
> The Pairwise Support Matrix is the matrix whose entry PS(j, k) in 
> column k of row j ... is the number of ballots on which candidate j is 
> ranked ahead of candidate k.
>
> In each row j, circle the smallest entry ... m(j) = min over k of PS(j,k).
>
> In each column k, highlight its largest entry M(k) = Max over j of 
> PS(j, k).
>
> Let J be argMax m(j), obtained by looking at the row number of the 
> largest circled entry in the matrix.
>
> Candidate J is the Offensive Champ.
>
> Let K be argmin M(k), obtained by looking at the column number of the 
> smallest highlighted matrix entry.
>
> Candidate K is the Defensive Champ.
>
> If PS(J, K) is larger than
> PO(J, K)=PS(K,J),  then candidate J, the Offensive Champ defeats the 
> Defensive Champ K.
>
> If PS(J,K) is less than PO(J,K), then the Offensive Champ J is 
> defeated by the Defensive Champ K.
>
> (Otherwise candidates J and K are tied)
>
> -Forest
>
> ----
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