On Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 10:29:06AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Actually, since I had disconnected during the long debate that
> progressed here, there was a lot of material to cover, and
> digest. And I still think I would not be able to defend the method to
> someone uninitiated; I need to go look for the papers on the voting
> methods to be sure of my footing on this.
>
> However, I am willing to trust Raul and AJ to have researched
> the underlying method, and the language is clean and understandable,
> and thus I am willing to be a second for this proposal.
I'm still waiting for AJ to agree that the underlying method is
good.
As I understand it, he agrees with just about everything in the vote
tallying method I proposed, except the handling of supermajority.
Last I heard, AJ was thinking about proposing an amended version of
my proposal such that when supermajority is relevant different voters
having differing voting strengths.
As far as theory goes: the Smith/Condorcet mechanism produces the same
outcome as our current mechanism, except in its handling of certain
kinds of ties. If there's a circular tie, it tosses out the weakest
link of the chain, until the chain breaks.
The current mechanism can be made to ignore circular ties -- essentially,
you have to use A.6(2..4) only when there's a tie among first-preference
options (and A.6(6) when there's an all-around tie). [Also, to properly
handle votes with mixed supermajorities, you have to eliminate the
"final" from A.6(7).]
I couldn't think of a good way of phrasing A.6(2..4) so they'd only
take effect when there's a first preference tie -- all my attempts took
more verbiage than my original attempt at Smith/Condorcet. [Of course,
I've fleshed out the Smith/Condorcet procedure since then...] If you
want me to give this another shot, I can give it a go.
Concorde (Single Transferrable Vote) biases the vote in the direction
of what people say is best, using other preferences only to resolve
ambiguity. Smith/Condorcet biases the vote a bit more in the direction
of what the most people vote for.
Personally, I don't really care which underlying mechanism is used:
Smith/Condorcet or Concorde (Single Transferrable Vote). I just want
something that's not ambiguous about vote counting.
Thanks,
--
Raul
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