[EM] Question to the Condorcetists

[Steve Eppley]

It should be noted that the world's most widely used, most frequently used voting method is Condorcet-consistent, and therefore doesn't satisfy Participation.  I'm referring to the Robert's Rules "sequential pairwise" method for voting on motions.  If a court gives this due consideration, they would be unreasonable and arbitrary to be overly concerned about Participation.  Other criteria are much more important.  It's a reasonable bet that the decision by the court in Germany was corrupted by the desire to maintain the basic properties of their existing system, which favors the existing political elite, not the voters' best interests.

The Participation criterion compares the winner given sincere voting to the winner given abstention.  That's a false dichotomy.  When a voter has the information needed to deduce that abstention (nonparticipation) is probably a better strategy than sincere voting, that same information leads to a participating voting strategy at least as good as abstention.  Surely such strategies would be widely publicized when needed to defeat an extremist or loathed "greater evil."  Also, given a good Condorcetian voting method (such as Maximize Affirmed Majorities). typically the different winner would not be an extremist greater evil, so the change of winner shouldn't matter much.  The reason that would be typical is that a good Condorcetian voting method creates a strong incentive for candidates who want to win to support policies preferred by majorities. (Median-ish policies.)  A small change of votes would typically cause only a small change of the resultant policies, unlike with
other voting methods (including proportional representation), where participation is much more important.  Creating that incentive for candidates & parties is what I consider the most important criterion for voting methods -- it would lead to the end of political polarization, stabilize policies, reduce the incentive for vote fraud & voter suppression, etc -- but unfortunately it's hard to formally define it.

If earlier replies have already mentioned some of the above points, sorry about that.  I don't have enough spare time to read all the other replies.

--S


On 2/28/2024 1:36 PM, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
> Can Condorcet be weakened to comply with participation? Condorcet methods have plenty of advantages, but systems failing participation are vulnerable to court challenges or being struck down as unconstitutional, as seen in Germany.