Forum Council

@kodos I'll have a look to see if I can find a way to change that or if it's "hardwired" in.

@jack-waugh I see to an extent, but I would argue that your collapse of rankings is incompatible with the distinction by score. You prefer one to the other, even if they are both horrible, right?

@cfrank I honestly think that Trump and Harris deserve prison for life for supporting the killing of 17,000 Arab children. In a rating system, they both deserve the bottom rate. But on the ranking side, I would put Harris above Trump, because of his domestic fascist tendencies. Coupling would prevent honesty.

@jack-waugh I’m not sure, I think coupling encourages consistency, which is a prerequisite to honesty. The coupled structure is also simpler and more efficient. The score winner is not necessarily the Condorcet winner for instance, and need not be the winner of a Condorcet compliant method when the Condorcet winner doesn’t exist (e.g. B2R).

The same validation logic also works in a homologous sense for Smith compliance. I think it’s less flexible if for instance two divergent Smith compliant methods were pitted against each other in the absence of a Condorcet winner. In that instance though, the Condorcet winner could not be tested with the final head-to-head. I’m not sure about extending to particular special subsets of the Smith set in the same way, depending on the subset.

@toby-pereira I would say they are declared the winner if the methods coincide. Otherwise there may be potential clone issues. It’s also simpler that way. Although if we did have an unambiguous runner up, that would be preferred to validate any potential Condorcet winner status. For example, the second highest scorer.

But if we wanted the decision process to be consistent, that has the potential to cause a recursion of successive head to heads, say, if the two methods repeatedly coincide. Unlikely but still. That would probably be the “right” way to do it in this context.

I suspect that the tightness of coupling between the rating part and the ranking part is a problem with these schemes. The first ballot should have separate sections (or "races" in the terms of bettervoting.com) for rating and ranking, if we want the absolute peak of accuracy.

If you're pitting the winners of two methods against each other, what do you do if it's the same candidate? Are they just the winner, or does there need to be a final head-to-head between two candidates?

@jack-waugh exactly, that's the kind of thing I'm considering. Now I'm kind of puzzled though about whether a head-to-head between two winners of clone-independent methods can fail independence of clones. I actually don't think it's possible that the composite system fails independence of clones. FYI my preference for a Condorcet method would be Tideman's Bottom 2 Runoff (B2R), which I'm now certain is equivalent to BNR. For example, we could even pit the Approval winner against the B2R winner head-to-head. That would be a form of Approval-seeded Llull with a final independent head-to-head.

Or how about use the Score winner as one finalist, and the Minimax winner as the other.

So, to make a more concrete proposal for how to narrow the field to two finalists, we could say collect Score-style five-star ballots, and present the Score winner as one finalist, and do something like Copeland to get the other finalist, who would be the calculated Condorcet winner if there is one, and would be otherwise pretty good as determined by Copeland-like techniques in the absence of a Condorcet winner.