On Nov 25, 2008, at 1:19 PM, Markus Schulze wrote:
You wrote (25 Nov 2008):
We don't actually know who IRV would have chosen, since
the polling (and the campaign) didn't happen in the
context of an IRV election. It's not an unreasonable
conjecture that Bayrou would have gotten a larger
percentage of first choices (some from Sarkozy and
Royal) under IRV. Nor do we know how the smaller
party votes would have transferred.
So is it feasible to use polling data to show that
an election method would have violated some desirable
criteria? Or is complete ballot data needed?
Or are only IRV supporters allowed to use polling data
to show the greatness of IRV, while advocates of other
methods have to use complete ballot data?
I think we must be careful about using polling data when we're
comparing election methods in which voters have different strategic
motivations, and that taking sufficient care may preclude drawing firm
conclusions.
Personally, I don't think that any available single-winner method, IRV
not excepted, is particularly "great", though I prefer ranked-ordinal
methods to FPTP or TTR. My mild preference for IRV over Condorcet
methods (and stronger preference over approval and range) has to do
with wanting to keep strategic voter considerations to a minimum. That
ends up being a somewhat subjective and intuitive conclusion; at least
that's how I see it.
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