At 1:57 AM -0700 3/11/06, Jan Kok wrote: >I crunched the election data and found that Kiss was preferred to >Miller, 4755 to 3988. > >Drat. :-)
That's still not numerically consistent with the published Burlington results; I wonder what the discrepancy is. Let me dispute your "drat", though. Your thrust, I suppose, is that you'd like to find an IRV election in which there was a Condorcet winner not elected by IRV. I suggest that this quest is based on a fallacy, and that such a result could not legitimately be used to argue the merits of IRV vs Condorcet ranking. I'm not arguing the merits of IRV vs Condorcet here; I go back and forth on the question myself. I'm only arguing against the validity of a particular sort of evidence. The fallacy lies in different voter behavior. IRV and Condorcet ranking come with different guarantees to the voter. An example (and there are examples on both sides) is that IRV guarantees later-no-harm. That is, the IRV voter can freely rank lower choices with the assurance that those choices cannot harm the chances of the voter's earlier preferences. Condorcet ranking does not (and cannot) make that guarantee. So the same set of voters (in Burlington VT, say) faced with the same candidates but a Condorcet rather than an IRV election, are likely to cast different ballots. So to take an election profile that was made under IRV rules and apply Condorcet ranking to it might be of casual interest, but it's an apples and oranges comparison. I'm not claiming that later-no-harm is a decisive argument in favor of IRV; Condorcet ranking has its own advantages, and later-no-harm is not IRV's only advantage. I'm only arguing that you mustn't change the counting rules after the election without also giving the voters a chance to change their ballots in view of the alternate rules. All this is further complicated, of course, by the fact that voters are human, and are neither perfectly informed nor perfectly rational. But they're somewhat informed, and somewhat rational, and we must expect that the specific election rules in place will have some effect on voter behavior. -- /Jonathan Lundell. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info