Media Bias and Falsehoods
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Here is a biased article that makes false claims about Condorcet methods. I think it would be good for any of this kind of media that is found to be shared and openly scrutinized:
There is enough disagreement about voting methods as it is without false nonsense in addition.
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Are the raw votes or the summary preference matrix available? Is Begich the Condorcet winner? Were there only three candidates?
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@jack-waugh I don’t know, but I do know that the man said this:
“such an election is completely impractical to organize in the real world. You would have to stage multiple separate elections, each candidate running in a series of 'top two'-style runoffs against all the others. The one candidate who beats all others would finally be crowned the blessed winner.”
Which is absolutely absurd.
He also judges the Condorcet winner according to the placement of candidates obtained by the other arbitrary voting system, which is equally absurd. Nor does he even try to analyze the many motivations that many advocates have for preferring Condorcet methods. It’s just a biased straw man exposition that makes a superficial and misleading caricature of Condorcet methods.
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Here is a summary of how I'm thinking of replying. Maybe somebody here can critique it before I go to the original site and put my foot in my mouth.
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Author errs in describing the Alaska election merely as RCV; that is not a specific enough description. Alaska election was RCV IRV Hare.
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Maybe some people think that electing the Condorcet winner is the top constraint or criterion, but some who think it is valuable also value other criteria or constraints. Speaking as though they don't, amounts to straw-man propaganda.
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Author describes the Condorcet decision using more complexity than necessary, with the likely effect of convincing readers that it is more complex than it is. It can be done with preference matrices.
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If Palin describes [Hare in fact, even if she does not use that term for it] as more complex than some reasonable alternatives, she is correct. RCV IRV Hare is complex compared to for example Approval, finer-grained Score, and STAR. RCV IRV anything can require more than two rounds of tallying, depending on the count of candidates, but STAR is limited to two and all granularities of Score, including Approval, are limited to one, which is the count of rounds of tallying that Ms. Palin is accustomed to and no doubt regards as normal.
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The mentioned Approval, other Score, and STAR do not guarantee to elect the Condorcet winner if there is one.
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Failing to elect the Condorcet winner when there is one is manifestly minority rule in a circumstance wherein majority rule instead would have been possible.
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Hare his a high degree of suckitude not only because it violates Condorcet but probably more importantly because it violates Frohnmayer, conformance with which I regard as necessary to the survival of the human species for more than a few more generations. A candidate like Trump or Biden wouldn't even be up for thought if the people had Frohnmayer balance. And especially if they had that and Condorcet when applicable. An example is RCV (allowing equal-ranking) IRV bottom-two-runoff. If the author is such a fan of Hare, what grounds can the author give for opposition to equal ranking and opposition to bottom-two runoff?
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@cfrank said in Media Bias and Falsehoods:
He also judges the Condorcet winner according to the placement of candidates obtained by the other arbitrary voting system, which is equally absurd.
This bit stuck out to me as particularly egregious. He's complaining that the person who finished third would win using a Condorcet method, making Condorcet bad. But finishing third isn't some objective measure - just the result of some other method. All it says is that different election methods give different results.
In any case, that very same argument was used against the very method he's advocating in this video. (This is from the UK referendum in 2011 on the voting method to be used in national elections, and IRV was known as Alternative Vote or AV. Also you can skip to about 1:45 in the video to get to the point.)
It was a stupid argument when used against IRV and it's a stupid argument when used in its favour.
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@toby-pereira Oh wow that video is insane hahah. I don’t know how much of that kind of thing is ignorant versus how much of it is intentional.
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I wrote, "A candidate like Trump or Biden wouldn't even be up for thought if the people had Frohnmayer balance.". This is obviously false. However, I think that a combination of F-balance with another constraint or two would produce that effect. The other constraint would be a sort of "additivity".
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@cfrank said in Media Bias and Falsehoods:
Oh wow that video is insane hahah
And naturally, they have comments turned off.
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@jack-waugh in the fashionable style
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@toby-pereira a historical re-enactment in the style of this video is to have one of the kids tying his shoelaces together with another’s or something, and then the third winning because the other two fell over
Also, the ridiculous irony of using a race like that to demonstrate their argument is: the winner of the race IS the Condorcet winner!In fact, I think using a race analogy is a great way to convince people that the Condorcet winner is at least worth consideration when it exists. And a Condorcet cycle could be shown with runners chasing each other in a circle rather than proceeding toward the finish line.