[EM] Clarity of principle.

[Michael Ossipoff]

Richard—

I must confess that it isn’t entirely clear what you’re talking about.

I didn’t say that the Constitution explicitly bans PR.

I said that it’s requirements would make nonsense of any attempt at PR in
national government.

As for your Condorcet vs Borda issue, perhaps you aren’t aware that CTE &
Duncan ( like MinMax(wv) & CW,Approval) are Condorcet methods. They use
Borda as part of their mechanism to disqualify the buriers’ candidate in
order to deter burial strategy.

On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 09:06 Richard Lung <voting at ukscientists.com> wrote:

>
>  Clarity on principles
>
>
>
> Dear EM list,
>
>
>
> If a thing needs doing, there is no point in complaining about it being
> hard. This was a point made by Winston Churchill.
>
> The US Constitution could not ban an election system, not invented till
> the next century.
>
> At least, those who introduced a quota-preferential bill to Congress
> apparently didn’t think so. And what the cities could do, surely the
> federal government also could.
>
> State-level suppression of local autonomy in introducing proportional
> representation, notably Massachusetts state banning other cities, in the
> state, than Cambridge from using STV/PR, was not a constitutional decision,
> but only so far as brute force could go, by way of arbitrary self-will
> without principles.
>
> Therefore, the way forward is a principled one. My advice, such as it is,
> to any electoral reform proposal, as that made by Forest, is that it needs
> to be clear on the principles on which it operates, so that politicians can
> be clear to the public, on the kind of election they are being offered.
>
> The incorporation of the Borda method in a recommendation involves the
> first recognition (by Laplace) that lesser preferences count less.
>
> This was in direct contradiction to the systematic elimination count
> offered by Condorcet. The advantage of this pioneering debate was that it
> offered a clear choice between all-inclusive weighted preference count and
> exclusive unweighted preference count. Only the former offers the Laplace
> requirement to count preference order of importance.
>
> One problem I had was that weighted Condorcet pairing, counting each
> margin of victory, was about as accurate as Borda method, as one could tell
> by inspection, even of a very narrow contest.
>
> I have now come to the conclusion that weighted Condorcet pairing is
> effectively (on average) a weighted preference order count, first required
> by Laplace.
>
> Each voters preference is not suitably weighted by order of importance.
> Instead, the lack of weighted orders of preference for each voter is made
> up for, firstly by the fact that all the votes (at any order of choice) are
> equally or indiscriminately treated in this manner, but, on average, a
> collective order of preference emerges, in the margins of victory for each
> candidate pairing.
>
> However, what might be called Condorcet implicit preference weighting has
> its limitations. It does not reflect personal orders of preference for
> personal representation. And it changes with who votes in the electorate.
>
> Never the less, weighted Condorcet pairing, to some extent vindicates
> (collectively) weighted order of preference. But in doing so, it reinforces
> the case against unweighted elimination counts. Hence weighted Condorcet
> pairing may be approximately as accurate as the Borda count, both in
> principle and in practise for the single member case.
>
> An advantage of a Binomial count, a rational count for the exclusion,
> equally as well as the election, of candidates, is that it can apply to
> single-member as well as multi-member constituencies. (I.e. a binomial
> count offers the consistency of a general theory of elections.) The
> necessary practical consideration is that  all the preferences (including
> abstentions) are counted, so it is known how much the voters wish to elect
> or exclude the candidates. The consideration of principle is to introduce
> and uphold the law of conservation of (preferential) information.
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Lung.
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
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