On 23 Feb 2005 at 20:25 PST, Kevin Venzke wrote: > Dave, > --- Dave Ketchum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit : >> Try: >> 5 a>b >> 2 b>a >> 6 a=b >> By not counting the = we have 5:2 >> With counting them we have 8:5 >> >> The > and < determined that a gets 3 more votes than b - to me, strength of >> a's win over b. > > It's called "Margins" when defeat strength is measured as the vote > difference. With WV, the defeat strength is the number of votes for the > winning side; in this case, it would be 5 votes. > >> I have the = making a have a total of 8 votes, useful (I think) in deciding >> how to untangle cycles, should that be needed. > > A potential problem is that it becomes unclear how many people actually > voted a>b. > > Kevin Venzke [CC: Steve Eppley, Markus Schulze, Rob LeGrand, election-methods list]
Hi Dave, As Kevin has pointed out, by counting a=b as a>b + b>a, winning votes (wv) acquires some characteristics of relative margins (rm). With your tabulation rule, the margin doesn't change, but the winning vote totals do. IMO, 'a=b' indicates equal preference, equivalent to abstention from the pairwise election. In other words, it's a vote to consider that particular contest AFTER all other considerations. That should be true whether one ranks defeats using wv or rm. I have noticed this tabulation disagreement before, e.g. Rob LeGrand's voting calculator (http://cec.wustl.edu/~rhl1/rbvote/calc.html). I've looked around briefly for an authoritative differentiation between the two tabulation rules, but aside from discussion on this list I haven't found one, hence the CC's. It would be nice to get this misunderstanding cleared up. Any method description or software that uses a non-standard interpretation of equal rank tabulation should clearly indicate that it is doing so. If it is confusing to e-m list readers, imagine how confusing it would be to voters! Ted -- Send real replies to ted stern at u dot washington dot edu Frango ut patefaciam -- I break so that I may reveal ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info