Dear Dave! I truly apologize for giving you a headache, which is surely the last I want to cause... The thing is, although it seems to me that I try to make the most obvious things clear, it seems to need explanations over and over again. So, excuse me for repeating some arguments in reply to you...
you wrote: > We are electing ONE PERSON, Of course we do. But we do it as a group of people, by aggregating individual preferences which are interpreted as containing valuable information about which candidate is both socially optimal and a just and stable choice. That does *not* require each voter to have so much information that s/he can tell a unique first choice. > Given an IRV ballot I proceed as you describe above (except, if I am > a serious voter, I will likely do less coin tossing). So, may I ask what you would do instead when pressed to give a strict ranking? Because this was the imagined situation in my example... when ties had been allowed, the ranking would of course have been A and B first, C and D second. But note that that would still distort my true preferences in erroneously indicating a preference of B over C and of A over D... > Given a Condorcet ballot I proceed in EXACTLY the same way, > expecting IDENTICAL results, even though the debating may use different words. Sorry, I can't follow you here. What is a "Condorcet ballot"? I know ranked ballots with or without ties and with or without truncation. And I know pairwise ballots with the possibility to vote either A>B or B>A for each pair A,B, hopefully with the additional possibility of voting A=B (equivalence) or A?B (abstention). On the other hand, the term "Condorcet" refers to a method not a ballot, isn't it? > Correction - liking X1 better than X2, I do not need a coin toss to > prefer B over C! Are you sure? Well, I'm not: X1 may only be slightly better than X2, but Y2 may be FAR better than Y1 without me knowing that because I'm not an expert on issue Y. In that case I would surely prefer C to B, the only problem is that at the moment of voting I don't have that information. So I would be stupid to express a preference B>C when it can easily be that my true preference would be C>B as soon as I get enough information. > Also, not caring as to C>D vs C<D, I should not vote a nonsense > implied preference between them. Your absolutely right!!! That's what the whole example is about!! I don't want to be forced to express nonsense preferences which I don't have only to be able to express some other preferences I do have. BUT THE RESTRICTION TO USE RANKED BALLOTS FORCES ME TO DO EXACTLY THIS, and that's what the example shows. > But, in your demonstration voting, you indicated a preference about Y that > you admit here was nonsense. See above. >>> However, let's assume that the ranking system in question allows you >>> to, rather than flipping a coin, simply rank A and B equally. In >>> other words, declare them a tie. >> >> >> That would be fine as long as I could really do so! But as long as I can >> only express rankings I cannot do as you suggest! In a ranking, I cannot >> tie A=C, B=C, A=D, and B=D and simultaneously express A>B and C>D. >> > Agreed that the target you offer is impossible, BUT, it has nothing to do > with whether the sentence you are responding to is valid - and I see > validity there. Yes, of course, the sentence is right: if I were allowed to tie all pairs of candidates which I'm actually undecided about, then fine. But again ranked ballots do *not* allow me to do this as I explained in the above sentence. I did not suggest to falsly express undecidedness as equivalence, I only responded to that suggestion and showed that it doesn't lead us nowhere... All the best, Jobst ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info