For Cardinal Condorcet Supporters
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Hi! @rob and @Andy-Dienes in particular, I notice that according to your present tags, you both agree that cardinal Condorcet is a very good system. I can imagine based on its name alone why it may be desirable. Personally I would prefer something less majoritarian than a Condorcet method alone (as you know), but at the same time, I can see that the modification I have envisioned of finding higher-order Condorcet winners that satisfy a certain consensualistic desirability criterion is perhaps somewhat complicated, and the simplified version of finding the secondary Condorcet winner is susceptible to strategic nomination by “packing” (forgive my informal/slangish terminology, more candidates = advantage).
That might not matter to voting theorists if the results are “good,” but in terms of systems that may potentially gain widespread support I think you guys are right that simplicity is pretty much paramount.
So I’m wondering if you would be able to provide any resources about cardinal Condorcet methods that you find particularly good, convincing and/or informative, and maybe to lay out your own rationale for supporting that kind of system. For example, how is bullet voting addressed if cardinal scores are used? Or is that just a vulnerability? In that case, isn’t it liable to reduce to approval and thereby basically regular Condorcet + strategic “noise”?
Thank you in advance!
score-stratified-condorcet [10] cardinal-condorcet [9] ranked-condorcet [8] score [7] approval [6] ranked-bucklin [5] star [4] ranked-irv [3] ranked-borda [2] for-against [1] distribute [0] choose-one [0]
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@cfrank I like Condorcet methods of basically any flavor; you would have to intentionally try if you wanted to construct one I don't like. The reason I like cardinal Condorcet methods has more to do with the ease of voting than anything to do with quality of the method; I just like the idea of using a 5-star ballot and not having to worry about equal or skipped rankings.
For Condorcet methods I find particularly convincing, I like the Minimax family (e.g. Minimax, Stable Voting, Schulze, Ranked Pairs) and the IRV family (e.g. Benham's, Woodall's, Tideman's), and some idiosyncratic ones like Score Chain Climbing or Score Sorted Margins.
That's kind of bikeshedding though. Tbh if it's Condorcet and the cycle resolution method is at least kind of reasonable, it will probably be a top-tier method.
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@cfrank Geez I hate being boring and just agreeing with @Andy-Dienes again, but.... yeah. Cardinal ballots (i.e. 0-5) I think are the easiest for voters. Higher resolution cardinal ballots are even better, where it is practical. It makes sense for the votes I am proposing we do in this forum, since it gets more information out of each voter. (0-10 with as many decimal places as you want)
But really, the best methods will just ignore the information that goes beyond ranking, or if they do use it, it is as a last resort.
I'm not overly concerned with bullet voting, as those voters are choosing to not use all the power granted to them. I wouldn't characterize it as a vulnerability, any more than people choosing not to vote, or choosing to equally rank candidates (if that is allowed).
As for what I think is most sellable to the public: probably ranked not cardinal ballots, simply because RCV is a thing. I think you could sell a Condorcet method while just calling it RCV. Bottom-2-runoff is good in that it is the smallest change to RCV. A simple version of minimax is good because it can be based on a pairwise matrix alone, which makes it most easily precinct summable.
Recursive IRV is.... well I'm kinda obsessing over it at the moment. But I won't say more at the moment until I understand it better.
