[EM] Did anyone pay attention to what he said about Approval vs Condorcet?

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 05/29/2024 11:00 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Just one more astronomical reference:
> 
> Next time you look at the Milky-Way, or a long-exposure photo of it or any galaxy:
> 
> Realize that, for every one of its estimated half-trillion stars, there are 12 instances of having to find a candidate-name in a ranking of 135 candidate-names, when doing a handcount of Condorcet with 135 candidates (the number that a recent California governor-election had), & 300 million voters.
>  
Only 135?  That's nothin'.  We should have a couple thousand candidates for governor on the ballot.  Why not?

 
> BTW, when I posted my reply to one of KM’s last posts before he temmporarily left this list, I worded it as a reply to him, even though I’d removed his name from the post’s “To:” field, as he’d requested.
> 
> In that reply, I often said that I didn’t know what he meant. In philosophy it isn’t unusual for what one person says to be completely meaningless to someone else.
> 
> That doesn’t mean that one of those people is wrong. It’s just that one person’s philosophical framework & topic isn’t the other person’s.
> 
> KM’s philosophy of voting systems, & the philosophical framework in which he was discussing them can rightly, validly & reasonably influence KM’s preferences & choices among voting-systems.
> 
> But it doesn’t apply to the objective matter-of-fact Approval-properties that I’d stated.
> 

I dunno, different countries and different states do different things.  But where I am from, the state has actual ballot access requirements.  A certain number of signatures.  I think the legislature had someone do research on some probabilistic correlation of how many signatures required and how many candidates make it onto the ballot.  How much they settled on, I don't know but there are usually 4 or 5 candidates on the November ballot for Governor of Vermont.

Now for IRV, 5 candidates is 205 tallies.  For Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR, it's 25 tallies.

For 4 candidates it's 40 for IRV and 16 for Condorcet-Plurality.
 
But you heard of "The Paradox of Choice"?  We don't want just two candidates, we want more choices than that.  But we don't want 135 candidates either on even an electronic ballot.  (And I will never give up on paper ballots and optical-scan technology, so I want all these races to fit on a single ballot, front and back.)

We just don't want more than the 4 or 5 most credible candidates.  The way you get sufficient credibility to be on the ballot is to get lots of valid signatures on a petition.  The number of signatures needed is a function of the population of the district of the elected office.

So hyped-up numbers for a wild-assed hypothetical doesn't persuade.

I'm missing KM already.

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r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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