On 9 Mar 2005 at 10:29 PST, Forest Simmons wrote:
Most of the proposed Approval/Condorcet Compromises assume that the CW is more desirable than the Approval Winner when they are not the same candidate, i.e. the Approval Winner is only to be considered when there is no CW available.
That seems to me like a kind of one sided approach to "compromise."
Well, if one is a Condorcet advocate, one might view Approval as means toward the end (intuitively appealing cycle resolution), and not necessarily as an equally valid end.
That's right. I don't see the need for a compromise between Condorcet and Approval. Condorcet is fine except that it needs a good way to break out of cycles, and Approval is made to order for the job.
Perhaps I am fooling myself, but the more I think about the method I proposed (or resurrected) for combining Condorcet and Approval, the more it makes sense to me. Here's the method again for reference:
Each voter ranks the candidates and specifies an Approval cutoff. The CW wins if one exists, otherwise the least-approved candidate is dropped until a CW emerges.
The need for each voter to specify an Approval cutoff does complicate the implementation a bit, but it also gives the voter a critical mode of expression.
Think of the Approval counts for each candidate as filling in the unused diagonal elements of the pairwise matrix. Whereas the off-diagonal elements contain the scores for each pairwise race, the diagonal elements contain the scores for each candidate vs. the "expected value" of the election itself.
As I said before, this method is much simpler than traditional Condorcet methods that drop defeats rather than candidates, and I believe it will have a much better chance of being accepted for public elections. It may still be too complicated, but at least it will have a better chance.
Methods that involve dropping candidates are too complicated and arbitrary to be acceptable for major public elections for the foreseeable future -- and then some.
--Russ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
