On 29.5.2011, at 16.06, Peter Zbornik wrote:

> On the other hand I might rather prefer "My Political Opponent" to be elected 
> than "Pol Pot".
> Thus a ballot on the form A>X>My Political Opponent>Pol Pot, might be a good 
> idea to allow.

I like this kind of explicit cutoffs more than implicit ones (at the end of the 
ranked candidates) since implicit cutoff easily encourages truncation. If 
people like to truncate their strongest opponents we might end up having bullet 
votes only. That would mean that we would be back in plurality, and all useful 
information of the ranked votes would be gone.

The explicit cutoff works well in elections where it is possible not to elect 
anyone (maybe keep the old elected alternative, or maybe arrange a new election 
after a while). One could also have elections where there are many possible 
outcomes, e.g. a seat for 6 months or a seat for 2 years (A>2y>B>C>6m>D). In 
these cases it is possible to measure quite reliably which candidates fall into 
which categories (e.g. "approvable enough"). The detailed rules on how to 
interpret e.g. a pairwise defeat to a cutoff entity have to be agreed.

Using the cutoff to give "negative votes" to candidates below the cutoff line 
(in the sense that such "negative votes" would really decrease their chance of 
winning candidates above the cutoff line) may be problematic since people could 
start giving negative votes to their worst competitors as a default strategy.

There have been also various proposals allowing strength of preference to be 
expressed (e.g. A>B>>>C>D>>E).

Juho




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