In the Plurality world, ALL YOU HAVE is your fractions of 100 percent, and nothing to tell you how they interact when you try to extract useful information.
Now, look at the Condorcet world. As in a tournament, the ballot counting produces an array telling, for EACH pair of candidates, how many voters liked A better than B, and how many liked B better than A. Something new to get used to, but each pair of numbers is a much clearer statement as to which of the pair is preferred.
On Mon, 2 May 2005 16:06:44 -0700 Curt Siffert wrote:
I know many of us are here to work on the best method for various social choice purposes. But many of us are specifically interested in political elections.
And there's a problem with this. Plurality actually serves two purposes. It is a bad way to select a winner, but it is also a way to track percentage support over a period of time, and by determining proportional support when it's relevant.
Democratic primaries are an example. The proportion of votes a candidate receives determines how many delegates they receive. But even if that particular decision structure is done away with, there are plenty of other reasons to track proportional support - polling, for instance.
This one does demand thought - including whether this particular election should use Condorcet. Could think of adding an extra row to the array, counting who voters ranked as first choice.
And this is something that Condorcet methods cannot do. You cannot derive, from a Condorcet ballot collection, how much percentage support each candidate got. You can't give each candidate a share of 100% in a way that all candidates would agree on. If you can, I'd love to know how.
Is this an already identified criteria? The ability to determine percentage support? The Siffert Criteria? :-) If so, Condorcet fails it; at least, I haven't seen a technique that would allow it to pass it. What voting methods can convincingly a) identify the total available support (in terms of that vote method) for all candidates, and b) determine what percentage of that support each candidate received ?
Thanks, Curt
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