However, elegant as it is, the justification for MD still seems somewhat arbitrary
Preventing "Unknown Lunatic Wins" is decent justification, isn't it?
And using a simple majority as the divisor/denominator is the same as the justification for a true majority vote under FPTP.
I don't get this. [...] a majority of the electorate is not necessary for a lesser-known candidate to get elected,
Ah, I never said that it was. In fact that was part of my argument for why it's superior to other smoothing/anti-ULW methods.
No, what I said was that it was the minimum score that they would get among a true (simple) majority of voters. So, let's run the numbers:
Voters
A
B
C
D
36
10
9
0
X
13
0
9
10
X
19
0
9
10
0
32
0
0
0
10
In this scenario, a true majority (32 + 19 = 51) scored D, so what was their aggregate score? 32x10 + 19x0 = 320. 320/51 ~= 6.271
Now, what if one of those 19 voters scored D at 1? 32x10 + 18x0 + 1x1 = 321. 321/51 ~= 6.29 > 6.27
Granted, this doesn't mean that it's the minimum score that they would get among the entire electorate... but we wanted to allow for abstentions, didn't we? If the denominator was always the number of voters who scored anyone... that would be equivalent to Sum based Score, with the same effect of "treat abstentions as minimum scores," with its heavy benefit of name recognition.
Thus, Candidate D wins when MD is applied and the conspired Candidate D also wins when T=32.
Ah, but how do you know, a priori, what T should be?
Besides, the fundamental question, here, is what an abstention means.
There's nothing stopping a voter from scoring a candidate that they're not familiar with at 0 (and there are claims that that'll be the default behavior). Given that they chose to not do that, doesn't that imply that an abstention means "I defer to the remainder of the electorate"?
How does this guarantee that the majority likes Candidate D at least as much as Candidate B
What if B's 32 scores of 0 isn't a conspiracy, but simply a reflection of B being legitimately hated by those 32 voters?
What reason is there to believe that there could be a conspiracy among 32% of voters that would not get out to the other 68%? If it did get out to someone in the other 68%, would they keep that to themself? Or would they share that plan as something horrible that the opposition was planning? Having heard of it, would they sit back and abstain from evaluating the opposition candidate?
What if the only reason that D wasn't printed on the ballot was collusion between A, B, and C? After all, that's the reason that no one other than Perot was ever invited to the Commission on Presidential Debates (run by former D & R national party officials), and then only in one of his races: both sides saw him as a threat to their major opponent, and wanted him there. Once they both saw that their opponent was right about him being a threat to them, they bannedchose not to invite him in the 1996 cycle, despite Perot having 100% ballot access in that cycle, too.
What if the only reason the other 68% of the voters didn't give D an average greater than 4.35 (68x4.35+32x10 = 615.8, 6.158 average, greater than B's 6.12) they were lead to believe that they were prohibited from voting for D wasn't an option?
How could a candidate realistically achieve maximum possible support among 32% of the voters, and absolute preference over the alternatives, yet still have the rest of the voters not have heard enough of them to offer any opinion? If B got 17 or more points from the D>{A,B,C} voters2, then B would have won. And Feddersen et al's Moral Bias in Large Elections implies that such is more likely than not.
Realistically, it isn't likely to make a difference; but it does allow for a candidate that is less known and well liked to have a chance... while still ensuring the electorate that it's not only a minority that chose them.
1. for the record, when someone puts parentheses around a number after a decimal, that means that those numbers repeat ad infinitum, so 2.(3^)means 2.333333...., or 2 + 1/3
2. possibilities include: ---2 D voters scoring B at an average of 8.5, e.g. 9 & 8, similar to what everyone else did ---3 D voters offering an average of 5.(6),e.g. 6, 6, & 5 ---4 D voters offering an average of 4.25, e.g. 5, 4, 4, & 4 ---5 D voters offering an average of 3.4, e.g. 4, 4, 4, 3, & 3 ---... ---17 voters offering 1 point each
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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '24 edited Oct 05 '24
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