[Fwd: Re: [EM] [Fwd: Re: approval voting and majority criterion]]

[Ken Johnson]

Forest Simmons wrote:

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Ken Johnson wrote:

 

It may be that majority rule is preferable, but as illustrated above it
is clearly not self-evident that majority rule is always preferable.
Therefore majority rule should not be posited axiomatically; it needs to
be justified on the basis of a more fundamental statement of "the goal
of single-winner voting".
   

A more fundamental goal might be to go with the choice that would be
acceptable to the greatest number of voters.
That sounds like Approval. The method follows directly and obviously 
from the statement of the goal, no formal proof required.

By way of analogy, which is better, an economic system that makes 51% of
the people rich and relegates the other 49% to abject poverty, or a system
that makes 90% of the population comfortable, and still provides for the
basic needs of the other 10%?
Forest

 

Better yet, how about a system that makes EVERYONE equally rich, 
although the 51% might be just slightly less rich than they would be 
under the first system.

Ken Johnson



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