EMers, The July 2004 issue of Scientific American prints three letters in response to the article "The Fairest Vote of All" from the March issue. One is from Philip Macklin, Terry Bouricius and Rob Richie, CVD folks, who criticize the article's dismissal of IRV (the authors claimed IRV might have given the same pathological result as top-two runoff in the 2002 French election) and give the usual IRV objection to Condorcet. They present the example
40:A>C>B 45:B>C>A 15:C>A>B and argue that the IRV outcome, A, is the fairest one. The authors of the article reply, gently pointing out that A can hardly be the fairest outcome when 60% prefer C to A and that IRV might indeed have elected Chirac. (While true, it seems unlikely to me that IRV would have eliminated Jospin before Le Pen in the real election since most leftist- party voters would have voted Jospin over Chirac and Le Pen.) Another letter recommends Approval, and the third one explains how a ranked-ballot Condorcet system might encourage insincere voting by some real-world voters. Unfortunately, the authors' response dismisses the concern as relevant only to Borda ("rank-order voting") and not to Condorcet ("true majority rule"), which is an unfortunate simplification. ===== Rob LeGrand, psephologist [EMAIL PROTECTED] Citizens for Approval Voting http://www.approvalvoting.org/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info