Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

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Watch the hair-raising descent in today's stage of the Giro d'Italia.

I love reading about Republicans who refuse to accept Donald Trump as their nominee for president. Think of a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum and you get the idea. Some of them prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, on the ground that she will last only four years, whereas Trump might last eight. They also think that Trump will transform the Republican Party forever, thus effectively destroying their political careers. We now know that when these people say that they care about the United States and its people, they're lying. They care about their careers and little else.

When I say "careers," what I mean is this. William Kristol is publisher of the Weekly Standard, which claims to be a conservative magazine but is really a neoconservative warmongering publication. (Kristol never met a war he didn't like. Note that his ass is never on the line.) He has to take a hard line on Trump so as to keep his readership. Erick Erickson is a talk-radio host and columnist. Some of the others mentioned in the story, such as Rick Wilson, Mike Murphy, and Stuart Stevens, are consultants who live off politicians the way leeches live off their hosts. These consultants will never work for Trump, and they know it. If Trump wins, they may as well find a job selling insurance.

A final thought. Ben Sasse's political career will not last long. He is a vociferous opponent of Trump. Trump's supporters, who are legion (including in Sasse's home state of Nebraska), have taken note of his arrogance and petulance and will no longer support him. Bad move, kid. This may go down as one of the worst decisions in the annals of politics.

Budgie (1971).

To the Editor:

“Unusual Flavor of G.O.P. Race Illustrates a Paradox” (The Upshot, May 10) gives an incomplete picture of social choice theory.

Yes, the French mathematician the Marquis Condorcet showed that choices may cycle, and Kenneth Arrow’s generalization of this paradox showed that there is no perfect voting system, but both results are founded on the assumption that voters rank candidates. If, instead, voters grade candidates, these results no longer hold.

The simplest grading system is approval voting, whereby voters indicate all candidates they find acceptable (give a grade of 1); the others are deemed unacceptable and receive grades of 0. The candidate with the greatest number of approvals wins the election.

Under approval voting, there can be no cycle: The candidate who wins is more approved than every other candidate in paired comparisons.

Because approval voting does not restrict voters to supporting only one candidate, it tends to elect the most acceptable candidate over all, not the strongest minority candidate who benefits from a divided field.

In the 2016 Republican primaries, polls show that Donald Trump was not acceptable to a significant portion of Republican voters, so he would not have done nearly as well under approval voting.

STEVEN J. BRAMS

New York

The writer is a professor of politics at New York University and the author of “Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair-Division Procedures.”

Note from KBJ: If Steven J. Brams had wings, he would be able to fly.

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