[Foundation-l] Board vote, need a bit of help

[Anthony]

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> So in an election between Batman, Superman, Wonderwoman, Fidel Castro,
> Frankenstein,  and Satan  lets assume you prefer Wonderwoman, think
> Batman and Superman would be okay.  You think the rest suck but think
> Fidel Castro the worst of the ones you dislike.
>
> A reasonable ballot given those preferences might be
>
> Batman 2
> Superman 2
> Wonderwoman 1
> Fidel Castro 4
> Frankenstein 3
> Satan 3
>
> You could also leave Fidel Castro unranked but that would have exactly
> the same effect on the election.

Would it?  Due to the failure of later-no-harm, isn't it possible that
ranking Satan over Castro might actually cause Batman to lose and
Satan to win?

> Schulze method does not not have the "Later-no-harm criterion", so
> your less preferred choices *can* influence results related to your
> higher preferred choices.  But, unlike approval or borda Schulze's
> failure to meet later-no-harm doesn't translate into an obvious usable
> strategy in the general case.
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later-no-harm_criterion gives a much
needed example of this.

I think I can derive at least one general strategy for this situation,
and it seems to resolve my problem with the condercet criterion
promoting compromise candidates.  The strategy is, if there are
multiple candidates that are *unacceptable*, you shouldn't rank any of
them.

Another way of looking at this is that you really are indifferent
between all unacceptable candidates.  You may hate Castro more than
Satan, but either way if one of them wins and the board ratifies the
decision you should leave the project and work actively against it.
And from the other side of the coin, if a voter doesn't think either
of two candidates are acceptable, their vote shouldn't count anyway.

Cool, I guess I can support the Schulze method once again, with the
hope that those Memphis voters don't rank Nashville as their second
choice.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tennessee_map_for_voting_example.svg)