[EM] Poll, preliminary ballots

[Richard, the VoteFair guy]

On 4/18/2024 2:21 PM, Toby Pereira wrote:
> I'm interested in your positive case for MinMax over Ranked Pairs (or 
> River). To me it just seems essentially like a less sophisticated 
> version of them.

Three decades ago, when I first became aware of vote splitting, 
information about vote-counting methods was not available online.  (It 
was only available in academic journals.)  So I used my math/physics 
background to imagine a better method.

First I considered what I later discovered to be IRV.  I recognized that 
it didn't look deep enough into the voter preferences.  Next I 
considered what I now recognize to be Ranked Pairs.  That too didn't 
look deep enough because it looks for a "biggest" or "smallest" number 
(one at a time).  Next I considered doing the equivalent of fitting a 
straight line to a set of data points.  That revealed what is 
mathematically equivalent to the Kemeny method.  My version counts 
support and finds the maximum sequence score.  (It's described in my 
1993 book titled "The Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox.")  John 
Kemeny's version counts opposition and finds the minimum sequence score. 
  Wikipedia describes the version I imagined.  Markus Schulze said the 
two are mathematically equivalent and I have trusted that claim.

It was later that I learned about MinMax.  That seems to look deeper 
into the pairwise counts compared to Ranked Pairs.

That's basically the source of my preference.

I'm still waiting for academic measurements that reveal how often each 
method fails the various criteria.  When those measurements become 
available I'll be able to better compare the methods.

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy


> On Thursday, 18 April 2024 at 19:43:33 BST, Richard, the VoteFair guy 
> <electionmethods at votefair.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>  > And why do you think that MinMax(wv) is better than either?  Doesn't
> it fail Smith and Clone Independence?
> 
> See above about my lack of concern about the difference between "never"
> and "almost never."
>