On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 10:09:57PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > On ven, 2008-02-15 at 15:50 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > Having said that, I agree with you that it makes sense for the TC to not > > require 'X + 1', since the electorate is so small anyway; > > I don’t understand why the previous argument wouldn’t apply to a small > number of voters. Because of the error you're making. With 6 people, 2/3 of the votes is 4 votes, with no error. "more than 2/3" needs 5 votes, or 5/6th. So even though the stated requirement is "more than 2/3", the actual requirement is "at least 5/6th". The difference is 1/6th of the votes, or 16 2/3%. In other words, due to the small sample, the requirement is more than 16% higher than intended. By making this change, the technical requirement is lowered by epsilon. The real requirement though, is lowered by 16 2/3%. This is a choice. For 50%, I agree with Wouter that we really want an actual majority. For supermajories, though, I think this isn't so important. The precise value of how much "super" it needs to be is pretty arbitrary anyway (unlike for 50%, where the meaning is "most people agree"). Setting this arbitrary value epsilon lower means that the actual votes (in the case of small samples, such as the TC) are much closer to what we are saying (2/3 instead of 5/6). IMO this is totally acceptable for arbitrary values, such as "2/3", but not for the meaningful value of "1/2". Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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