You don't have to rank them all just as many people as you want; you are allowed to rank people at the same level even.
Actually a better way to explain condorcet uses a grid with all the candidates down the left side and then all across the top.
The directions read: "Mark a box if you prefer the candidate in the left column to the candidate on the corresponding top row" or something like that.
The problem is that such a ballot is complicated to print and handle so through some really interesting Matrix algebra it was shown that the same thing could be done with a number ranking system.
Holy F****, that has to be the worst explination of Condorcet I've ever seen!
Anyway several people have done a better job down in the discussion and I tried to compare it to Approval voting (the other method that seems to be popular).
Can anyone who's had more than 20 minutes with Condercet comment on this?
Not the way I'd explain it but it is pass-able. Personally I prefer simplified examples.
Why I'm NEVER going to support IRV in a National Election:
We used to use run-off voting in our Fraternity
Elections before we swapped to Condorcet. What run-off voting does is eleminate compromise candidates early on. In a national election this will favor the more extream candidates over the moderate ones.
Example:
We have three candidates X,Y,Z. Let's say the voting goes like this:
40% Like X the most.
40% Like Z the most.
20% Like Y the most.
However, 30% of the voters for X, would rather see Y win than Z and 30% of the voters for Z would rather see Y win than X. The remaining 10% only want their candiate to win. So the break-down of the ballots looks like this:
10% - X --- They only like X, Y & Z are equally bad.
30% - X,Y --- They prefer X but like Y more than Z
10% - Y,X --- They like Y but lean toward X
10% - Y,Z --- Y with leaning toward Z
30% - Z,Y --- Like Z; like Y less than Z but more than X
10% - Z --- Only like Z, Y & Z are equally bad.
Now, this is a democracy so our voting should try to make the maximum number of people happy (alternatively, we could define fairness as minimizing the number of unhappy people, more in a moment). Ideally Y should win, because the most people support him, the fewest oppose him, and he would win one-on-on against both other candidates.
However with plurality or IRV we end up with a tie between X and Z (because the "compromise" candidate is eliminated in the early round).
Condorcet solves this problem by breaking each election up, into a bunch of one-on-one elections and figuring out a winner in all of these simplified cases.
Condorcet has certain interesting properties by design: it is essentially stratagy free (being dishonest with your vote does not get you any ground), and it will find an Ideal democratic winner if one exists. However it does have several practical limitations (that are mostly irrelevent to smaller groups but could cause problems if used in something as big as a Presidential election): Because it is ranked, adding one vote can swing a very close election in unexpected (but technically correct) ways, as such, you cannot break the counting up as you can with plurality or approval the counting must all be done on all ballots simultaniously (this is no problem for a small group but for a large election, it would require computer-systems to count up the vote), and finally, some people claim that Condorcet implicitly compromises on behalf of the voter.
Note that Condorcet is not perfect; it is however the closest to perfect that exists.
There is another method that has most of the good points of Condorcet but trades away some of them to get a few practical benefits: Approval. Approval voting asks the voter to mark all candidates who he approves of for office (the goal being to minimize disatisfaction).
Unlike Condorcet, under Approval voting, adding one more vote does not cause an unexpected outcome (but the outcome might not be technically correct); Approval voting also allows the vote counting to proceed in smaller groups and have the result total up and make sense. Additionally it forces the voter to decide what they are (or arn't) willing to compromise on.
However approval voting is subject to some voting stratagy and a successful implementation relies on explaining the strategic aspects to the voters. Because of the strategy element, Approval voting is not as accurate as Condorcet for small groups and groups that don't follow polls.
An example of a good stratagy is to watch the polls and vote for everyone you prefer to the front runner, then vote for the front runner if you prefer him to the second-place candidate.
BUT the IRV is at least well intentioned and I think with enough pushing it could be changed to require Condorcet or Approval. (If we are going to spend a ton of money we might as well go all the way and use Condorcet)
Hypothesis: The classes have little impact because they are mostly taught by un-enthusiasic, un-inspiring teachers/coaches who don't give a shit. Like most classes in the US, the course plan mostly sucks and students are bored witless. Teachers stress memorization of facts over gaining of knowledge. Because of the stress on memorization, students realize the class is worthless and put zero effort in, grades go lower. As a result of poor grades, the course is made "easier" and more focus is put on memorization (this is also called having "standardized testing"). Due to the stress on memorization,...
It's a pretty bad cycle. That needs to get addressed. However I think it's separate from the issue with voter turn out (and has nothing to do with my original point).
Poor voter turn out is most probably the result of two things:
People don't like either of the two guys running and view them both as equally bad choices. They don't vote at all. Having the mandatory option of "None of the Above" on all ballots (where if it wins, a new election with none of the former candidates is held), would make give almost everyone who is hesitant to vote for the lesser of two evils a way to express their thoughts.
People who arn't informed enough on the issues and don't vote because they have no opinion. Better communication on the part of political parties, non-profits, and the candidates themselves could address this problem (these are potential voters). However most of these people don't have an opinion because the existing political parties don't fit them. This is why encouraging third party candidates is important. Giving better ballot access to third parties and changing our election system (to Aproval or Condorcet) would go a long way to fixing this problem.
A Civics class is mandated by law in my state. I guess I just assumed that was the case nationally. Is it not? If not, I agree with you, it should be. If it is, we need to work on our implementation.
Unless I'm reading the chart wrong, it looks like IBM's VM is faster than Sun's for many applications. (It just doesn't seem to have an Opteron version)
You missed my point; the article gets information wrong and is clearly biased
I've used OBSD for ~4 years and have never seen Theo act "erratic and basically socially unacceptable". The only things that people could possibly be refering to are his insistance that OBSD not add or keep any software with restrictive licensing in the tree. OR the attitude of most of the people on the misc list (theo included) that dumb questions (that could be answered by RTFM or google) deserve dumb derisive answers. I don't see either of these as a problem.
> The attitude on the mailing lists is one of the big reasons that I've found OpenBSD not to be optimal for my desktop.
Personally, I LIKE the attitude on the mailing lists. It keeps people on topic (mostly) and scares off everyone too incompetent to RTFM and run a google search before posting.
Too bad I can't mod the story flaim bait; the treatment of Net and Open is a bit heavy handed and the article seems to be written as a FreeBSD advert....
That would be because they want to make profit. The base model of most non-luxury cars sells at a slight loss. The manufacturer hopes to make more then that money up by getting people to buy extra options and features. (This would also be why trucks, SUVs, and luxury cars have gotten more development attention recently).
Actually stuff is running in the default install, SSH being the primary example (That's where the 1 hole comes from); you can now have SSH turned off by default.
The point of OpenBSD is SANE defaults (i.e. not running telent, ftp, and rsh by default). Turning on Apache (bundled by default) is really simple, and because they've gone through and clobbered most buffer overflows and built everything with ProPolice, what were on other systems are root holes turn into non-events or program crashes (which can in theory be used to do a DoS, but that's a huge improvement).
Radiation containment is simple compared to the stuff used to make micro-chips, and so little of it is produced that having enough space to store it is trivial.
Approval voting is subject to voting stratagy though, in some ways more so then our current system.
I'll agree that we need a better election system; Personally I'm ultimiately in favor of the Condorcet System of voting because it's stratagy free. However, there are actually two problems with the system: The winner take all electoral system results in a couple of key areas in a few key states determining the results of the election, and the voting method we use is subject to stratagy, and pressure to support a "major" candidate.
I accept that the electoral college idea is a compromise designed to make small states and rural areas count, but we really need a constitutional amendment to require the assignment of votes on a congressional district basis. (The at-large votes could still be winner take all or divided proportionally)
Alternatively, each state could divy it's electoral votes on a proportional basis compleately. This has the advantage that it causes the electoral vote to be slightly more in line with the popular vote but there are other problems with this approach.
So let me get this straight, any person (but not corporation) can pay however much money they feel like to have advertising run?
I don't think that's allowed. If it was you'd have rich politically oriented guys buying up most of the TV time around elections (durring the black out period) and running ads.
So I'm pretty sure if I tried to run a banner ad on Slashdot the day before the election, I'd get in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried (and did a barely passable job at) comparing them above.
You don't have to rank them all just as many people as you want; you are allowed to rank people at the same level even.
Actually a better way to explain condorcet uses a grid with all the candidates down the left side and then all across the top.
The directions read: "Mark a box if you prefer the candidate in the left column to the candidate on the corresponding top row" or something like that.
The problem is that such a ballot is complicated to print and handle so through some really interesting Matrix algebra it was shown that the same thing could be done with a number ranking system.
Anyway several people have done a better job down in the discussion and I tried to compare it to Approval voting (the other method that seems to be popular).
Not the way I'd explain it but it is pass-able. Personally I prefer simplified examples.
Why I'm NEVER going to support IRV in a National Election:
We used to use run-off voting in our Fraternity Elections before we swapped to Condorcet. What run-off voting does is eleminate compromise candidates early on. In a national election this will favor the more extream candidates over the moderate ones.
Example:
We have three candidates X,Y,Z. Let's say the voting goes like this:
40% Like X the most.
40% Like Z the most.
20% Like Y the most.
However, 30% of the voters for X, would rather see Y win than Z and 30% of the voters for Z would rather see Y win than X. The remaining 10% only want their candiate to win. So the break-down of the ballots looks like this:
10% - X --- They only like X, Y & Z are equally bad.
30% - X,Y --- They prefer X but like Y more than Z
10% - Y,X --- They like Y but lean toward X
10% - Y,Z --- Y with leaning toward Z
30% - Z,Y --- Like Z; like Y less than Z but more than X
10% - Z --- Only like Z, Y & Z are equally bad.
Now, this is a democracy so our voting should try to make the maximum number of people happy (alternatively, we could define fairness as minimizing the number of unhappy people, more in a moment). Ideally Y should win, because the most people support him, the fewest oppose him, and he would win one-on-on against both other candidates.
However with plurality or IRV we end up with a tie between X and Z (because the "compromise" candidate is eliminated in the early round).
Condorcet solves this problem by breaking each election up, into a bunch of one-on-one elections and figuring out a winner in all of these simplified cases.
Condorcet has certain interesting properties by design: it is essentially stratagy free (being dishonest with your vote does not get you any ground), and it will find an Ideal democratic winner if one exists. However it does have several practical limitations (that are mostly irrelevent to smaller groups but could cause problems if used in something as big as a Presidential election): Because it is ranked, adding one vote can swing a very close election in unexpected (but technically correct) ways, as such, you cannot break the counting up as you can with plurality or approval the counting must all be done on all ballots simultaniously (this is no problem for a small group but for a large election, it would require computer-systems to count up the vote), and finally, some people claim that Condorcet implicitly compromises on behalf of the voter.
Note that Condorcet is not perfect; it is however the closest to perfect that exists.
There is another method that has most of the good points of Condorcet but trades away some of them to get a few practical benefits: Approval. Approval voting asks the voter to mark all candidates who he approves of for office (the goal being to minimize disatisfaction).
Unlike Condorcet, under Approval voting, adding one more vote does not cause an unexpected outcome (but the outcome might not be technically correct); Approval voting also allows the vote counting to proceed in smaller groups and have the result total up and make sense. Additionally it forces the voter to decide what they are (or arn't) willing to compromise on.
However approval voting is subject to some voting stratagy and a successful implementation relies on explaining the strategic aspects to the voters. Because of the strategy element, Approval voting is not as accurate as Condorcet for small groups and groups that don't follow polls.
An example of a good stratagy is to watch the polls and vote for everyone you prefer to the front runner, then vote for the front runner if you prefer him to the second-place candidate.
BUT the IRV is at least well intentioned and I think with enough pushing it could be changed to require Condorcet or Approval. (If we are going to spend a ton of money we might as well go all the way and use Condorcet)
Bah! I'm just pointing out how what seems like a good idea has been abused in the past.
Hypothesis: The classes have little impact because they are mostly taught by un-enthusiasic, un-inspiring teachers/coaches who don't give a shit. Like most classes in the US, the course plan mostly sucks and students are bored witless. Teachers stress memorization of facts over gaining of knowledge. Because of the stress on memorization, students realize the class is worthless and put zero effort in, grades go lower. As a result of poor grades, the course is made "easier" and more focus is put on memorization (this is also called having "standardized testing"). Due to the stress on memorization, ...
It's a pretty bad cycle. That needs to get addressed. However I think it's separate from the issue with voter turn out (and has nothing to do with my original point).
Poor voter turn out is most probably the result of two things:
A Civics class is mandated by law in my state. I guess I just assumed that was the case nationally. Is it not? If not, I agree with you, it should be. If it is, we need to work on our implementation.
OTOH, since you are having standardized questions and we now have reps from both parties at the polling places, it MIGHT hold up to a court challenge
If "None of the Above" is picked, a make-up election is scheduled and none of the candidates who ran in the last one can run in the new one.
Why? In MS we just keep the polls open late so that people can go on their way home from work.
Have you seen what comes out of jury trials? I'd hate to have our elections that random. Personally I'd like to make jury duty optional.
Perhaps time and money would better be spent addressing those reasons instead of bribing people to overlook them.
Unless I'm reading the chart wrong, it looks like IBM's VM is faster than Sun's for many applications. (It just doesn't seem to have an Opteron version)
Personally, I LIKE the attitude on the mailing lists. It keeps people on topic (mostly) and scares off everyone too incompetent to RTFM and run a google search before posting.
LMFAO! Didn't even notice I'd done that. Hahahah...
Too bad I can't mod the story flaim bait; the treatment of Net and Open is a bit heavy handed and the article seems to be written as a FreeBSD advert....
What happened to Digital? What happened to Microsoft? Love 'em or hate 'em Microsoft clearly made the better business decision with that one....
That would be because they want to make profit. The base model of most non-luxury cars sells at a slight loss. The manufacturer hopes to make more then that money up by getting people to buy extra options and features. (This would also be why trucks, SUVs, and luxury cars have gotten more development attention recently).
The point of OpenBSD is SANE defaults (i.e. not running telent, ftp, and rsh by default). Turning on Apache (bundled by default) is really simple, and because they've gone through and clobbered most buffer overflows and built everything with ProPolice, what were on other systems are root holes turn into non-events or program crashes (which can in theory be used to do a DoS, but that's a huge improvement).
Radiation containment is simple compared to the stuff used to make micro-chips, and so little of it is produced that having enough space to store it is trivial.
I'll agree that we need a better election system; Personally I'm ultimiately in favor of the Condorcet System of voting because it's stratagy free. However, there are actually two problems with the system: The winner take all electoral system results in a couple of key areas in a few key states determining the results of the election, and the voting method we use is subject to stratagy, and pressure to support a "major" candidate.
I accept that the electoral college idea is a compromise designed to make small states and rural areas count, but we really need a constitutional amendment to require the assignment of votes on a congressional district basis. (The at-large votes could still be winner take all or divided proportionally)
Alternatively, each state could divy it's electoral votes on a proportional basis compleately. This has the advantage that it causes the electoral vote to be slightly more in line with the popular vote but there are other problems with this approach.
One on one, he's a great guy. I'd say he gets nervous and uncomfortable in front of a room full of people.
I don't think that's allowed. If it was you'd have rich politically oriented guys buying up most of the TV time around elections (durring the black out period) and running ads.
So I'm pretty sure if I tried to run a banner ad on Slashdot the day before the election, I'd get in trouble.