Talk:Defeat strength

EPOV on defeat strength
User:RobLa, I'd like to offer the EPOV on the most-recommended measure of defeat strength for readers of this article. My understanding is winning votes may have more consensus, and that's also what my vote would be for. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 08:52, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
 * What would be the reason for an EPOV ruling on this? It's true that winning votes seems to have had rough consensus on EM list for a long time now, but I don't remember the rationale well enough to say why.  User:Kristomun probably has a more informed opinion.  Regardess, what change would you like to make that requires a subjective statement about the preference of "winning votes" versus "margins"? -- RobLa (talk) 03:56, 25 March 2020 (UTC)


 * I just think a lot of readers might benefit from having a decisive "this is what election experts recommend" judgement. Otherwise, I think that it is very easy for readers to feel overwhelmed and underinformed, and question whether they chose the best measure, and scrap Condorcet methods altogether. Suppose someone comes from the Schulze method article, eager to pick a measure; wouldn't that reader benefit from seeing a vote of confidence in a particular measure? If you wish to demur on having a strict EPOV, then at the least I'd request the mailing list's consensus on the properties of the different measures so as to make it easiest for readers to make their own judgements and feel confident with whatever they choose. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 04:15, 25 March 2020 (UTC)


 * If I were to guess, I think most people prefer wv because methods using it usually pass the Plurality criterion, which seems a very natural thing to demand. (Not all methods, though; Raynaud(wv) still fails it.) Furthermore, as far as I remember, wv is less vulnerable to strategy than margins. There are still people who prefer margins, though; Juho comes first to mind. Minmax(margins) passes both Condorcet and mono-add-top, and no method that passes both Condorcet and Plurality can pass mono-add-top (http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE6/P4.HTM).


 * My impression is that the favorite defeat strength method count (as in, how people would vote in a honest FPTP election where wv, margins etc. are the choices) would have wv first, margins second, and then everything else below that point. As for how people would vote in a honest Approval election with those choices, I have no idea. I probably wouldn't make much of a ruckus if a state was about to pass Schulze(margins) instead of Schulze(wv) or whatever. I would make an objection to Minmax(pairwise opposition), but that's because it has a particular failure scenario that is unpalatable to me, and is more about the method being both Minmax and PO than it is about pairwise opposition in general. Kristomun (talk) 11:21, 25 March 2020 (UTC)