On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 21:28, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: > Consistency, like a number of other criteria, is relevant to how > well a voting system reflects the electorate's wishes. Say a candidate > wins in each district. If he wins in each district, there's a > meaningful sense in which he can be called the people's choice in > each district. One hopes that the result, when a set of ballots is > counted, in some way represents what those people want. So then > we count the whole set of ballots systemwide, and that candidate > loses. If there's some way in which the outcome in the districts > can be called the people's choice, representative of what they want, > then how can we say that about the systemwide result? The voting > system has acted inconsistently. That's all the criterion is saying.
The argument seems to be that if X wins a district under method M, than method M says that X is the choice of the district. It makes sense to think of districts as having choices, and method M says that it is candidate X. If X wins in every district, then we can look at X as the unanimous choice of the districts (according to M), and therefore X should win (if M is being consistent). The argument takes the convenient phrasing (that a group chooses a candidate) and interprets this as if it were literally true that groups have choices. They don't. Neither do districts. Nor is there really a people's choice in a district. Some people choose one thing, some another. Of course, you could define people's choice so that it means the winner under a particular method. But that doesn't mean that you can treat the voters as if they were all just participants in a group opinion. --- Blake Cretney (http://condorcet.org) ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em