Re: Condorcet Voting and Supermajorities (Re: [CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT] Disambiguation of 4.1.5)
On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 12:36:21PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> That depends what you consider "plausible". I'm willing to believe the
> constitution has bugs, and that in some circumstances it may very well
> come up with nonsensical results for a vote. So I'm not willing to rule
> such an answer implausible.
It sounds as if you're interested in interpreting the constitution such
that the results are nonsensical.
> > Single Transferable Vote biases the selection in favor of first
> > preferences at the expense of other preferences. Can you think of a
> > better kind of criteria for making the selection?
>
> Other methods can be found at the URLs I cited at the start of the
> thread. "Reversing the fewest and weakest pairwise defeats" (ie, using
> the smallest possible casting vote) is probably another reasonable
> alternative. But, as I said, I don't profess to know enough about
> cycle breakers to really say.
But: I'm not asking "are there other methods", I'm asking "what's a
better criteria?" and "why?"
I'll note that the URL you cited doesn't have anything equivalent to
Single Transferrable Vote. [So it's not comprehensive.] I don't think
"my favorite web site doesn't mention this system" somehow makes the
systems it proposes to be somehow superior.
The nice thing about Single Transferrable Vote is that it automatically
makes first preference votes more important than second preference votes
(and so on). There are few systems at the URL you cited which even
attempt this.
> This sort of situation happens no matter how you resolve a cyclic tie,
> though. You pretty much have to be "unfair" in some sense to choose a
> winner. As I said, I'm inclined to suspect that there other means are
> likely to be more optimal, although I'm not clear exactly how.
It really sounds more as if you want to find faults in the constitution
than you've thought this through and have a better alternative to propose.
That's not in and of itself a bad thing, but it does lead to a lot
of talk.
Thanks,
--
Raul
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