Jameson,

You claim  to be concerned about the "chicken dilemma" scenario and
you've typed that you think a method
should "tend to respect Majority Condorcet". while making it plain that
you aren't ready to die in a ditch for
FBC compliance (and presumably that also applies to Later-no-Help).

Also you say that practical reform proposals should be able to be easily
explained and justified to the non-expert
"man in the street" (although the method you currently advocate, U/P,
only just  fills that bill if you omit some
"fine print" that contains some complicated arbitrary rules about
default ratings).

Not in the spirit of  Ockham's  Razor.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/occam-s-razor

C: As Mike Ossipoff recently explained, U/P  (along with IBBIFA, MTA,
MCA, MJ)  fails the  Chicken Dilemma criterion.  And U/P fails the
Condorcet criterion.

So as something that better fits your stated aims, I suggest simply
3-slot Condorcet//Top Ratings:

Voters give the candidates one of 3 ratings (say Top, Middle, Bottom).
Default rating is bottom-most.
Inferring ranking from these ratings, any candidate that pairwise beats
all the others wins.
Otherwise the candidate with highest Top Ratings score wins.

Smith//Top Ratings would be technically a bit better, but  the "Smith
set"  part  would probably make the method harder to explain.

Chris Benham

On 09/25/2016 03:08 AM, C.Benham wrote:

Couldn't you get Smith by a Llull-type method without much more
additional complexity?

Line up the candidates in order of first preferences. Then, starting
with the candidate with most first preferences as head of the line,
compare the candidate at the head of the line with the one next in line.
Whoever loses pairwise to the other is eliminated. Keep going until only
one candidate remains.

Or does that compromise CD?

2016-09-24 21:08 GMT-04:00 C.Benham cbenham@adam.com.au:

The current version of U/P does not have that complexity. Here is the full
statement:

For each candidate, you can downvote (rate "unacceptable"); upvote (rate
"preferred"); or neither. All candidates downvoted by a majority of those
voting in the election, or with fewer than half the upvotes of the
most-upvoted candidate, are eliminated, unless that would eliminate
everyone. Of those remaining, the most-upvoted wins.

Hmm... I just realized that Mike's messages have been inexplicably going
into my spam folder for some time now (less than a year, more than a
month). I'm really sorry about that! It was never my intention! I've now
gone back and read most of the recent messages and there's plenty of good
stuff there.

I do not believe that the CD criterion is the best measure of which methods
deal well with CD situations. The CD criterion requires a method to be
punitive, meaning that it will react very badly (elect the Condorcet loser)
in certain center-squeeze scenarios:

35: A>B
25: B (honest is B>A)
40: C>B

CD criterion says that if A wins under honest voting, then B, who is the
honest and voted Condorcet winner, cannot win under strategic voting. I
recognize that A winning under honest voting is probably a failure of a
voting system, but it is not a failure that makes a system particularly bad
at chicken dilemmas. And B winning under strategic voting ameliorates,
rather than compounding, that failure.

What makes me think that U/P is a good system for dealing with CD, even
though it doesn't pass the CD? Basically, the idea is that chicken strategy
never puts ally1 below ally2 without putting ally1 below enemy; thus, it is
never successful without being dangerous. That means that, in order for it
to successfully change the election in a pure CD scenario (one where the C
voters have no A/B preference), the smaller B group must hope that they can
mobilize a supermajority of strategic B voters while keeping a
supermajority of A voters honest. I think that that's much less feasible
than if you dropped either of the "super"s.

The reason that I did not include any "pairwise" in U/P's definition is
that I think that it's tough to present pairwise results in a simple way.
Basically imagine a situation where A won, and somebody asks why didn't B
win. You don't want to have to mention any candidate but A and B in the
answer.

(Commenting farther down:)

On Sep 25, 2016 2:59 AM, "Kristofer Munsterhjelm" km_elmet@t-online.de
wrote:

But 3-Slot ICT meets FBC, & amounts to Approval without chicken-dilemma.

I'd offer it as "Deluxe Approval".

It's my favourite.

I'd advise people to top-rate (only) the very best, closest to then, whom
they really like & fully trust.

...& to reserve the middle-rating for candidates who are that good, but
whose voters they don't trust in what would otherwise be a chicken-dilemma
situation.

Ratings:

Sequential-Pairwise is an easy way to get Smith in show-of-hands voting in
a meeting.

But it's only for nonstrategic amicable electorates.

Sag the B voters doubt that B will survive it's pairwise comparison with A.

So they insincerely vote some C over A, to eliminate A before it gets to B.

Say you're an A voter. You're now  presentated with  a situation in which
you must choose between letting B win, or retaliating by insincerely voting
someone over B to eliminate it, resulting in a win for something much worse.

...a choice between capitulation, or costly retaliation.

Michael Ossipoff

Michael: could you define 3-slot ICT in the simplest possible terms? As you
would explain it to an election-method naif?

Thanks,
Jameson

2016-09-25 12:18 GMT-04:00 Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com: