On Jan 13, 2010, at 5:02 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: > On Jan 13, 2010, at 7:57 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > >> On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: >> >>> On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: >>>> On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: >>>> >>>>> it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and >>>>> proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order >>>>> ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. >>>>> with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? >>>> >>>> 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street >>>> fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. >>>> I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game >>>> is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like >>>> a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet >>>> variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each >>>> voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of >>>> their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple >>>> enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier >>>> to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. >>> >>> When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each >>> other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given >>> such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over >>> each other should count, and does with Condorcet. >> >> This seems to me to be a claim that is at best not self-evident (in the >> sense that Pareto or anti-dictatorship, say, are). While I'm not a fan of >> cardinal-utility voting systems, it seems entirely possible to make a >> utility argument or rationale against the *necessity* of electing the CW in >> all cases. >> >> That is, as a thought experiment, if we could somehow divine a workable >> electorate-wide utility function, it's at least arguable that the utility >> winner would legitimately trump the Condorcet winner, if different, while >> you couldn't make a similar argument wrt Pareto or dictatorship. > > how would you define that "utility function" metric in a democracy? would > the candidates arm-wrestle? take a written exam? flip a coin? what, other > than majority preference of the electorate, can be such a metric in a > democracy?
I don't think you can, and that's a big problem for Range, it seem to me. But we're talking about utility for the voter, not arm-strength of the candidates. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
