Donald Davison said: > A circular tie should be regarded as a warning bell to the fact that the > lower choices in this election are flawed and should not be trusted. > Most likely this flaw was caused by the voters not being informed well > enough to make good lower choices.
So uninformed voters lead to circular ties? A while back Adam gave a very good geometric argument that if you have 2 distinct issue categories (as opposed to the same old left-right pissing contest), an electorate of well-informed and rational voters can give rise to a cycle. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/election-methods-list/message/9857 Now, we can debate over the right way to approach an electorate divided in such manner as to give rise to a cycle. But there are perfectly good reasons why some well-informed voters might have the preference Libertarian>Democrat>Republican while others have Democrat>Republican>Libertarian and still others have Republican>Libertarian>Democrat. Heuristically, the first category might be people who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal but see social issues as more important than economic issues. The second category might correspond to liberals who see the Libertarians as simply too extreme (and God knows that Libertarian candidates campaigning to legalize ferrets while dressed as druids do nothing to dispel that notion). The third category might correspond to conservatives who see the libertarians as a good compromise, since Libertarians are fiscally conservative. Of course, Adam's example provides a more rigorous and general argument for why cycles will arise when voters are well informed. But the above shows the basic idea. Now, I freely grant that if political debate sticks to the same old cluster fuck of left vs. right, cycles would indicate uninformed voters. Only an idiot would have the preference Nader>Bush>Gore or Bush>Nader>Gore, at least if we restrict discussion to the left vs. right pissing contest. But once we break out of that paradigm and look at candidates as multi-faceted, anything is possible. > Anyway, in my school of thinking, almost all choices are suspect and the > policy should be to use as few as possible. This is one of the reasons > I favor Irving because Irving will use less lower choices than any other > multi choice method. Consider the following election: 45 Axx 45 Bxx > 10 Cxx > > Condorcet will use all the lower choices. Irving will only use ten > percent of the lower choices. Using less is best. Less information good! More information bad! OK... Alex ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
