Russ says:
That's all well and good, but you can't hide from the fact that when you drop a pairwise defeat you are ignoring the majority of voters who voted in that particular pairwise race. That's right: you are IGNORING THE MAJORITY of the voters in that race. Why do you have such little respect for majorities, and what gives you the right to overrule them?
I reply:
If it would make you feel any better, elect the entire circular tie. Someone recently suggested that, in polls, we should declare the entire Schwartz set as winners. I agreed. And also in organizations and governments that are willing to have a joint presidency.
Then, at least if the public collectively say that X is better than Y, you aren't electing Y but not X.
But, you see, the problem is that sometimes it really is necessary to elect just one.
Your strongly-felt concern is expressed in a way that suggests that you thought that you were saying something original. As if you had never seen my standard speech comparing wv and margins with regard to the ethics and fairness of overruling public pairwise choices. Perhaps you didn't read that paragraph before posting it at your website.
I always say that, if everyone has a pairwise defeat, and we have to elect just one person anyway, then that means that we have to elect some X, and not Y, when the public has said that Y is better than X. I always then say that that means that we're overruling a voted public choice, and I always say that we shouldn't do that lightly. That's why we should try to minimize the number of voters we're doing that to. WV looks at that number. That's one reason why wv is better than margins, but there are other reasons to, such as the strategy guarantees that wv offers.
Mike Ossipoff
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