I should add that, regarding the things I've been saying & will say about new methods & criteria, most of those ideas either were either originated or refined by Steve Eppley. Particular examples include, but aren't limited to, the idea of dropping only from among those defeats that actually contradict eachother regarding who should win--in other words, the defeats among the innermost set of candidates unbeaten from without; and the briefer wording for SD. Steve named that Least Contradicted Majority. Maybe that's a better descriptive name than SD. I use SD because it's what I've been using for a long time. I defined SD a long time ago on this list, in the wordier of the 2 forms that I stated here, but its criterion compliances weren't studied at that time. It could be objected that, when referring to what I call a "pairwise defeat", calling it a "defeat" could seem to be referring to the final election outcome. Maybe, but my reply would be that, in pairwise methods, a pairwise defeat _is_ what keeps someone from being the winner, and getting rid of his pairwise defeats makes him win. The trouble with "majority" to mean pairwise defeat is of course that it could be mistaken for a majority in the sense of more than half of the voters. Majority is the word used by at least some of Condorcet's translators for that meaning. Mike Ossipoff ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
