[EM] The rationale under the "winning votes" defeat strength measure

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Toby,

Le mercredi 25 juin 2025 à 12:02:55 UTC−5, Toby Pereira via Election-Methods <election-methods at lists.electorama.com> a écrit : 
>The way I've always seen it is that margins makes more sense from a purely philosophical or mathematical point of 
>view. As Grzegorz alluded to, winning votes can lead to weird discontinuities, and having 50-0 as a "smaller" win
>than 51-49 seems weird, to say the least. I see winning votes as purely practical and pragmatic. It purely exists 
>because of real-life strategic concerns, not because of any philosophical or mathematical ideal. It's clunky, ugly, and 
>mathematically illogical, but seems to deal with certain situations better than margins.

For me, I note that when someone comes up with a new method off the top of their
head and posts it to the EM list, it's quite frequent that these methods give
results that are similar to WV results. These may not even be Condorcet methods.

This suggests to me that WV's *results*, at least, are not very unique or
arbitrary. It's still possible to feel that there's an ugliness to *how* it
gets to the outcome, of course.

Kevin
votingmethods.net