EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Danny Kleinman
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | (6c) Continued All right, now that all the ballots have been matchpointed, let’s add the matchpoints of all three ballots: CANDIDATE MATCHPOINTS McReynolds 6.5 Nader 10.5 Gore 12.0 Bradley 13.0 McCain 16.0 Bush 13.0 Buchanan 7.0 Browne 6.0 Some political scientists have proposed that we stop here, and declare McCain the winner on the basis of his high matchpoint total. However, to adopt that proposal would sometimes result in a violation of Criterion (6), the Condorcet Criterion. In this essay, I won’t bother showing an example of how that could happen, but when I prove that the voting system whose presentation I am about to complete always satisfies the Condorcet Criterion, you will see that the proof doesn’t work if we stop here. The next step is simply to eliminate the lowest-scoring candidate from the tallying process (in this case, Browne) and repeat our tally with one fewer candidate, so that the computer which does the tallying creates a revised set of ballots, and keeps repeating the process until only one candidate (the winner) remains: CANDIDATE RANK MATCHPOINTS McReynolds 2nd 5.0 Nader 1st 6.0 Gore 3rd 3.5 Bradley 3rd 3.5 McCain 4th 2.0 Bush 5th 1.0 Buchanan 6th 0.0 CANDIDATE RANK MATCHPOINTS McReynolds 0.5 Nader 0.5 Gore 99 2.5 Bradley 99 2.5 McCain 2 5.0 Bush 1 6.0 Buchanan 5 4.0 CANDIDATE RANK MATCHPOINTS McReynolds 8 0.0 Nader 5 2.0 Gore 3 4.0 Bradley 2 5.0 McCain 1 6.0 Bush 4 3.0 Buchanan 6 1.0