[Slightly OT] Re: Voting

[Eric]

Joe Mason <joe at notcharles.ca> wrote:

> In article <1060m0593q1uo0d at news.supernews.com>, John Roth wrote:
> > I'd support the "Majority Rules" algorithm. See the article in
> > Scientific American (March, 2004 edition) If you run the
> 
> There's no free version of the article online, but the authors are given
> as Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin, and googling on the latter led me to
> http://www.sss.ias.edu/papers/papereleven.pdf.
> 
> So I'll assume the "Majority Rules" algorithm is yet another dumbed-down
> name for Pairwise Voting aka Condorcet's Method, and say that I like it,
> but there's not much point using it for a yes/no vote.  If you're saying to
> let people vote on several alternate syntaxes plus "reject outright" -
> perfect.

Yes, what they are decribing is a Condorcet Method, which they term
'True Majority Rule' and then provide to give a rather strong
justification for such a method.

More information about Condorcet methods can be found at:

  http://electionmethods.org/
  http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~seppley/
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method