--- On Thu, 13/11/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think that in order to get anywhere on this path, we > would have to know what it is we actually want from a > runoff. First I want to note that I don't want to promote runoffs, just to study them. > There are two reasons why you might have a runoff: > the honest, that voters can discuss which of the two > candidates are better without having to consider the others, Sometimes it may be possible to achieve the same effect my publishing polls before the election. > But what's a viable candidate? Is > it viable if in Smith (or mutual majority, or whatnot)? Mutual majority makes more sense than Smith. In the given example A, B and C formed a strongly looped Smith set, and D was a Condorcet loser (but not by mutual majority) that was almost a Condorcet winner. In this situation also D could be a viable candidate for the last runoff round. > > The party lists could be more interesting when > breaking Condorcet > > cycles. But in a runoff one could first vote between > parties and only > > then between candidates of the winning party. I'm > not sure that this is > > very useful, but this way one could e.g. reduce the > risk of the best > > compromise candidate of a party being eliminated too > early. > > > > For example > > 40: A1>A2>B>C > > 08: A2>A1>B>C > > 07: A2>B>A1>C > > 25: B>A2>C>A1 > > 20: C>B>A2>A1 > > A2 would be eliminated first in IRV but here A1 and A2 > form a party > > (with 55 first preference votes) and therefore C will > be eliminated > > first, B next, and then A2 will win. > > This seems to be more of a problem with IRV, and so I'd > say that a better solution would be to switch to another > voting system rather than try to patch it up with party > lists. Yes, this is a problem of IRV. Yes, there may be better methods than the IRV based ones. Use of parties may provide some limited benefits, but they add complexity too. Juho ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info