DDO should keep a voting system with multiple categories

Con must show that there is a significant problem with the present system and that changing the voting system will fix the problem. Every debater who has been around for a while will say they think they should have won a debate they lost, and they are right at least some of the time. So how do we improve judging? Con argues that by eliminating all standards as to what is good and bad in a debate, voting will improve. I think it should go the other way. Better voting comes from having common standards as to what is important, and in making debaters and voters aware of that. Judges of academic debates are presumed to have a good understanding of what's important. We cannot safely make that presumption here.There are no clear examples of bad outcomes from strategic voting on DDO Voters sometimes shade their voting strategically. If a voter believes strongly that one debater ought to win a debate, he will tend to award more of the seven points to the side he thinks should win. The voter may be correct in his judgment about who should win. He may be enthusiastic about the subject and read the debate very carefully, making a reasonable judgment about each category. Or he may not be so careful and just make a subjective appraisal of by how much he believes the side he favors won, which could be unfair. A vote counted as suspect by one side is likely to be counted as unusually perceptive by the other side. How many debates have been wrongly decided by strategic voting? In a close debate strategic voters will tend to cancel automatically. If the suspect votes make no difference in the outcome, we should be satisfied that they either offset or do not affect the tide of voting. Con offered only one example of a debate where there was a potential that strategic voting affected an outcome. In that debate, more people voted for the losing side than the winning side. But Con just assumed the outcome was unfair, without arguing it was in fact unfair. I had voted on that debate and at the time judged it to be very close. The debate could have gone either way, so there is no cause for complaint. Without even a single clear example of an unfair vote, Con has not established either that there is a problem of strategic voting unfairly affecting outcomes, or that up-or-down voting would provide an improvement.DDO debates show the change would produce more ties Of twenty debates examined, in only one was there a reversal of the winner and loser if each vote was presumed to translate to a full vote for one side or the other. The 0-1, 0-1, 0-2 voters might have called the debate a tie instead. Again it wasn't clear whether that made the voting more fair or less fair. Con dismisses my sample of twenty debate as too small, but con offered no data at all. A sample of 20 is not definitive, but it gives a reasonable idea of what is going on. I used the Bidwell-Wilson approximation to the confidence limits on the binomial distribution to get the error bounds. [10.http://en.wikipedia.org... If found in my sample that 17 of 20 debates were unchanged by up-or-down voting. The 95% confidence interval is that between 13 and 19 debates would be unchanged. The increased number of ties is put between 1 and 7. The number of reversals is between one debate in five and one in 120. Since Con only cited one reversal, even when pressed, it's likely the number is on the rare end of the interval. Clearly more debates would end in a tie because of the quantization, in my sample twice as many. I think it is less fair to the debaters to declare a tie when voters considering the categories thought that one side had won. How many debaters will say, “The new voting system is terrific, I'm getting more tied scores now!'? All subjective judging benefits from standards Con argues that the analogy of debate voting to judging subjective sports is invalid because debating is not an athletic competition. But the object of the competition is irrelevant to the logical process of scoring a subjective competition. In terms of judging, subjective sports, dog shows, flower shows, and pie baking competitions are alike in having subjective judging. The goal is to establish both for competitors and judges guidelines for what is better and what is worse, and how much each category counts. Con claims that because academic debate uses a primitive up-or-down system so therefore, DDO debates should use that system. The subjective sports moved to more sophisticated voting systems as a result of voting scandals. If academic debating became a competition having general interest and suffered a scandal from biased voting, academic debate would have no alternative but to move to more sophisticated point system as well. Despite the use of a point system, the Olympic figure skating in Sochi still had a voting scandal. But there is no effective Moderator checking on judges in the Olympics. A moderator could examine each point addition and deduction, and an inflated score would then be very difficult to defend. Reverting to an up-or-down system wouldn't cure the judging problem, because that was already tried at the Olympics without success. Having standards doesn't work if there is no threat of enforcement.The silly poll Con points to a poll of debaters that revealed that each debater thought that strategic voting was used on their debates. That's a standard bit of nonsense used all the time by poll takers. It's along the lines of “Are you satisfied with current government policy on X?” No one is completely satisfied, so there will a high percentage saying “No.” Upon getting the expecting ”no,” proponents then proclaim that they have a ringing endorsement for policy Y, which was not mentioned in the poll. I would have answered “yes” to the poll as well. However, my remedy is to better educate voters and to improve the ability to moderate voting. That choice wasn't posed.Not simpler, better Con said I wanted a simpler voting system. I don't. I want to keep the present system. I allowed the weights on categories could be tweaked, but I think they are now about right. What I'm proposing is a more elaborate system available as an option to help voters who want to know more detail on how to vote decide who should win each category. The same guidelines would be used by moderators. Saying “Vote for whomever you thought did best.” doesn't work, because "best" is undefined. It doesn't say, for example, that the relevance and quality of sources is far more important than the number of sources. It doesn't say what is a serious conduct violation and what is not. It leaves everything to the intuition of the voter, and that is not a good idea, particularly with the highly mixed character of DDO voters. When everyone uses there own standards, there are no grounds for claiming bias. It is officially arbitrary.Academic debate is not the real world I did not say that academic debating was worthless. I said it does not reflect the real world of jobs, community organizations, and politics. A gave a list of the significant differences between real world debate and academic debate. Con ignored every item I listed without giving counter arguments as to why the difference was unimportant. Con asserted that everyone wants to live in the world of academic debate forever. That's impossible. For example, conduct is a problem in academic debate, because debaters know that bad conduct is sure to be punished. Academic judges are individually selected. Con did not address any of the differences. My study of randomly selected debates showed the categories were working well. People were, to perhaps a surprising degree, considering each aspect of the debate. Making voting simpler makes it unpredictable, because each person has complete freedom to decide what is important and what is not. Judging can be improved only by making the standards more clear, not moving closer to polling.