[EM] Purpose of a poll

[Michael Ossipoff]

On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 11:49 Joseph Malkevitch <jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu>
wrote:

>
>
> As regards the poll, we know there is data that suggests that the order of
> the choices on the ballot can affect the results so I would recommend if a
> poll is conducted that the choices be listed randomly.
>

Surely listing them in alphabetical order would be good enough.


Also there are currently nominated choices where I do not understand how
> these methods work. It would be useful to have succinct descriptions of the
> methods listed when carried out with the ballot type used.
>

Yes, & their advantages—what they offer that the others don’t.  …& how that
was determined.


While I understand that there are downsides, I like encouraging honest
> ordinal ballots where all choices must appear with no ties (e.g. strict
> preferences; truncation not allowed).
>

Why would you want that?

If we don’t know the advantages the at least 23 methods, then no
merit-comparison among them is possible.  One shouldn’t vote on what one
doesn’t know. Rank that set equally.

Defensive-truncation is a powerful defensive-strategy in the
Minimal-Defense complying methods. …the wv Condorcet methods. They’re also
powerfully autodeterent, but a voter should have the right to use the
most-reliably burial-penalizing defensive-truncation if desired.

So votes in my classes were done that way. For the proposed poll there are
> so many choices already that even reporting only a vote matrix showing how
> many voters reported X preferred to Y and Y preferred to X would be a large
> array.
>

We should report an output ranking…the finishing order.  …even though its
top & bottom ends are most of interest.

>
>
> Joe
>
> ——————————————
> Joseph Malkevitch
>
> Email:
> jmalkevitch at york.cuny.edu
> Web page:
> http://york.cuny.edu/~malk/
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