Readers of and those who post regularly to this list participate for a variety of reasons. In my case, though now retired, I taught mathematics courses of different kinds. I wanted to show my students the value of mathematical thinking in understanding "fairness" questions. Via this list I learned lots of things beyond what I learned from the "scholarly" literature about fairness, which is vast and sometimes beyond my ability to decipher. As a scholar I made no significant contribution but as a teacher many students learned some of the complexities of "being fair." One message I showed my students consistently was that for many kinds of ballot types, when there were many choices to choose among, that even assuming honest ballots, there are different "appealing" methods of picking a single winner where the different decision methods yielded different winners when applied to a particular set of ballots produced by the voters. This led scholars such as Arrow, Sen, Gibbard, Satterthwaite, Black, etc. to study the fairness properties (axioms) obeyed by different systems and show that some lists of fairness rules cannot be met by any decision method consistent with "democracy." Furthermore, there are appealing election methods where with large numbers of ballots of some kinds even very fast computers cannot determine a winner in a reasonable amount of time. As regards the poll, we know there is data that suggests that the order of the choices on the ballot can affect the results so I would recommend if a poll is conducted that the choices be listed randomly. Also there are currently nominated choices where I do not understand how these methods work. It would be useful to have succinct descriptions of the methods listed when carried out with the ballot type used. While I understand that there are downsides, I like encouraging honest ordinal ballots where all choices must appear with no ties (e.g. strict preferences; truncation not allowed). So votes in my classes were done that way. For the proposed poll there are so many choices already that even reporting only a vote matrix showing how many voters reported X preferred to Y and Y preferred to X would be a large array. Best wishes, Joe —————————————— Joseph Malkevitch Email: jmalkevitch@york.cuny.edu Web page: http://york.cuny.edu/~malk/

On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 11:49 Joseph Malkevitch <jmalkevitch@york.cuny.edu> wrote: > > > As regards the poll, we know there is data that suggests that the order of > the choices on the ballot can affect the results so I would recommend if a > poll is conducted that the choices be listed randomly. > Surely listing them in alphabetical order would be good enough. Also there are currently nominated choices where I do not understand how > these methods work. It would be useful to have succinct descriptions of the > methods listed when carried out with the ballot type used. > Yes, & their advantages—what they offer that the others don’t. …& how that was determined. While I understand that there are downsides, I like encouraging honest > ordinal ballots where all choices must appear with no ties (e.g. strict > preferences; truncation not allowed). > Why would you want that? If we don’t know the advantages the at least 23 methods, then no merit-comparison among them is possible. One shouldn’t vote on what one doesn’t know. Rank that set equally. Defensive-truncation is a powerful defensive-strategy in the Minimal-Defense complying methods. …the wv Condorcet methods. They’re also powerfully autodeterent, but a voter should have the right to use the most-reliably burial-penalizing defensive-truncation if desired. So votes in my classes were done that way. For the proposed poll there are > so many choices already that even reporting only a vote matrix showing how > many voters reported X preferred to Y and Y preferred to X would be a large > array. > We should report an output ranking…the finishing order. …even though its top & bottom ends are most of interest. > > > Joe > > —————————————— > Joseph Malkevitch > > Email: > jmalkevitch@york.cuny.edu > Web page: > http://york.cuny.edu/~malk/ > ---- > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list > info >