Re: Condorcet Voting and Supermajorities (Re: [CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT] Disambiguation of 4.1.5)

[Rob Lanphier <robla@eskimo.com>]

Hi all,

You guys caught me sleeping.  This is the type of discussion I joined the
list to chime in on....  :)

On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Buddha Buck wrote:
> Could someone explain to me, in simple terms, how Condorcet-based 
> voting schemes work in the face of a supermajority requirement?

Well, I think you folks are charting new territory here.  What I would
suggest is a hybrid of Condorcet and Approval.

Here's how it would work.  Voters rank all candidates or options, but also
put in a "cut line" above which all candidates/options are approved, and
below which, no candidates/options are approved.  One could create a dummy
candidate to achieve this if the ballot isn't conducive to the "cut line" 
idea. 

The winner is still chosen by Condorcet (or Tideman, or Schulze). 
However, the ballots are also tallied according to the Approval method,
where all candidates above the cut line get a vote and approval scores are
created from the votes for each candidate. The added requirement can be
that the winning option must have the required approval rating (2:1, 3:1,
whatever).

In really rare cases this might lead to paradoxical situations where the
winning option doesn't have the required approval rating, but a lesser
option does.  However, my brain hurts trying to come up with the example,
so you're going to half to ask someone smarter with more time on their
hands.  :)  If one really wanted to handle this corner case, one could
call for a second vote among all options that had the required approval
score, or one could reverse the order of application of Approval and
Condorcet, and use Condorcet as the tiebreaker among all options that have
supermajority approval.

Rob Lanphier
robla@eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla