[EM] The Equal Vote Coalition and robla

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2025-04-03 21:58, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> About "Ranked Robin" that's seems to me to be a Sass invention and I
> don't understand why they tepidly promote that instead of just Condorcet
> RCV in general.  I have become convinced that for Condorcet RCV to ever
> be adopted in legislation, it will have to be either
> 1. BTR-IRV which requires only a small change to the existing IRV language or
> 2. a Two-method "straight ahead" Condorcet method.  Probably either Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR.
> 
> The reason I came to this position was from discussions with friendly
> legislators and legislative counsel here in Vermont.  We need for
> "The law should say what it means and mean what it says."  The
> Two-method straight-ahead Condorcet is simply that.  Any other
> Condorcet-consistent method seems to obscure what it's doing.  What
> we want the law to do is to insure that if more voters mark their
> ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B, that Candidate
> B is not elected.  That's the only way that ensures that our votes
> are valued equally (as in "Equal Vote Coalition") and for the
> election to not be spoiled and for voters to not be punished for
> voting sincerely (which disincentives tactical  voting).

What do you think of minmax? One possible way to put it is "in the 
absence of a Condorcet winner, elect the candidate who would need the 
fewest additional top votes to become one".

It has the disadvantage of not being Smith, and perhaps the standard of 
judgement could be considered arbitrary, but that phrasing is pretty simple.

(This works because an A-top ballot increases the pairwise strength of A 
vs everybody else. So the candidate who needs the fewest such votes is 
the one whose worst defeat is the least worst.)

As for the others, I would much prefer C-TTR to C-Plurality; I suspect 
the latter would be too easy to manipulate.

-km