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<pre><br>Dave:<br><br>You wrote:<br><br>Which leaves me promoting Condorcet. It allows ranking but, unlike
ABucklin or IRV, all that a voter ranks gets counted. Further, any
voter able to match their desires to Plurality or Approval for a
particular election, can vote by those rules and have them counted
with the same power by Condorcet rules.<br><br>[endquote]<br><br>Several problems with Condorcet:<br><br>1. Any method at all more elaborate than Approval, and especially a method<br>as different and elaborate as Condorcet is going to be much more suspect<br>than Approval is, to the public. Opponents will be able to say, "We don't<br>know enough about this voting system. It needs much study." Approval is<br>unique among voting system reform proposals, in that it's so simple, and such<br>a small modification of Plurality, that it's easy to show that it's an improvement<br>on Plurality, and only an improvement. That's much more difficult for more<br>complicated methods such as Condorcet.<br><br>2. For a handcount, Condorcet has much more count labor than does Approval.<br>If there are N candidates, then there are N(N-1)/2 pairs of candidates. For each<br>voter, a vote is counted among each pair of candidates. Now, in Approval, let's<br>estimate that, on the average, a voter approves half of the candidates. N/2 <br>approvals to be counted per voter. That means that Condorcet has (N-1) times more<br>votes to be counted, as compared to Approval. Sure, the Condorcet handcount needn't <br>take longer, if you hire more counters. But, for one thing, the count is equally<br>more expensive, whether you hire more counters to work the same hours, or the <br>same number of counters to work longer. Besides, the more count-work there is,<br>the more opportunity and risk for count-fraud there is.<br><br>3. Condorcet fails FBC. Though it's unlikely, there are situations where you<br>can only prevent a worse result by favorite-burial. No matter how rare those<br>situations are, some, probably many, people will favorite-bury therefore, because<br>, for many people, helping their "lesser-evil" is everything. With Approval, ABucklin,<br>MCA, MTA, and their conditional versions, and also with ITC, it's possible to <br>_guarantee_ that there can never be any reason to vote anyone over your favorite.<br><br>Even if you only value reason #1, above, that alone is reason enough to only propose<br>what is proposable, enactable _now_. Approval.<br><br>One other thing: I used to claim that burial strategy is well-deterred in Condorcet.<br>But now I admit that I was only considering 3-candidate elections. With more candidates<br>burial isn't well-deterred. If I can find a candidate who will be sufficiently well-beaten,<br>then I and my faction can safely make hir soundly pair-beat the sincere CW, without risk<br>of electing that candidate whom we're ranking over the sincere CW.<br><br>ICT has some good protection against burial, because burial can only work for a<br>candidate who is ranked #1 by more people than anyone else in the cycle.<br><br>ICT would be a better proposal than Condorcet, since it also meets FBC and CD (it's<br>defection-resistant, unlike Condorcet). But ICT share's Condorcet's problems #1 snd<br>#2, above.<br><br>Mike Ossipoff<br></pre> </div></body>
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