In the discussion about voting methods at http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/2139227&tid=226 "Orzetto" raises a point that I haven't seen mentioned before, that ranked ballot methods are more susceptible to vote selling and coersion than simpler methods such as Plurality or Approval. That post is copied below.
I would note that Condorcet is potentially slightly less susceptible to vote selling and coersion than IRV because IRV requires the chain of preferences "A>B>C" to be kept intact for each voter, whereas Condorcet only needs the pairwise preferences, so A>B>C could be reported on separate ballots as three pairwise preferences: A>B A>C B>C Cheers, - Jan http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=124076&threshold=0&commentsort= 0&tid=226&mode=thread&cid=10412579 Sorry, tried and miserably failed. (Score:2) by orzetto (545509) on Saturday October 02, @08:53AM (#10412579) I understand that in theory this Condorcet thing is nice. However, we had something like that in Italy - we could vote for up to four preferred candidates. Can you imagine the results? with 30 candidates for each party, there are 30*29*28*27 = 657720 possible combinations. This means, if you want to get elected with mafia help, you simply need to get 10 idiots nobody knows in your party's bottom list, and give everybody in your local poll station clear instructions about whom to vote: me, and three jerks nobody would vote in a certain sequence: if they are 10, you have 10*9*8 = 720 combinations, more than the size of an average poll station. Then, you place a picciotto at the poll station, who will have a check-list of combinations. If some combination is missing, somebody's car will be burning soon. This law was abolished with a referendum in the early nineties, which paved the way to the loss of power of the cleptocratic government parties; however, the success was short-lived as the cleptocratic forces reorganized in a better propaganda-focused group (a phenomenon known as trasformismo in Italy), and hold now office (other than direct control of most of the media). But that's another story... ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info