[EM] Condorcet Meeting: Narrowing the Field

[Forest Simmons]

Chris,

I agree with you in general, but I got side tracked by the "3 to 5
finalist" specification of the original Condorcet Meeting message.

Perhaps we should try to convince them to have more people in the final ...
or just do our own thing without worrying too much about their vision.

I think your simple suggestion of basing the primary on strict rankings
(truncated at will) makes practical a quite large primary.

fws

On Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 3:03 PM C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au> wrote:

> 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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