EM list-- Right after I sent my most recent posting, it occurred to me that 2 of my reasons for preferring SSD's choice in the tied clone sets example weren't really good reasons at all. The one about lesser-of-2-evils voters, and the one about the fairness of overruling the fewest voters. Because when you honor those voters' preferences in one of the clone sets, and it makes the other clone set win, the voters whom you honored probably won't thank you. Still, they'll understand the dropping of the weakest defeat, and won't regard it as an irrational action of the voting system. Maybe the tie solved by RandomBallot is better, but for actual meeting or committee purposes, isn't it a lot more convenient to avoid a random solution, and wouldn't people be more impatient with a method that requires random solutions more? Aside from that, as Norm said, SD, SSD, & Tideman are more intuitive than Schulze. Is the merit difference in that tied clone sets situation important enough to outweigh the greater difficulty of getting Schulze adopted, and the annoyance that its greater need for random tiebreaking would cause? I'm only talking about committees & meetings because, as I said, SD, SSD, & Schulze choose the same winner under many-voter conditions. Mike Ossipoff ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com