Hello Mike,
Thanks for the comments. I agree with most of the stuff. Few comments follow.
Best Regards, Juho
You continued:
This is based on the assumption that strategical voting is not that easy in real life, at least not in elections where the number of voters is large.
I reply:
It happens in every election in the U.S. People say that they're abandoning their favorite to vote strategically. Millions do so.
I should have said "... strategical voting in _Condorcet_ methods ...". I thus mean that all Codorcet methods are pretty good in eliminating strategic voting. And the remaining cases (I think all of them are related to cycles) are not necessarily easy to use. I'm sort of hoping that in most cases in Condorcet elections it would be wiser to vote sincerely rather than try to do something strategical. Many of the voting methods in use today have one order of magnitude more problems than any of the Condorcet based methods does.
The fact that the voters don't have good information on which to base strategy has never stopped them from attempting to vote strategically, by using the unreliable strategic information that they've heard from their tv.
This is interesting. I believe that when Condorcet based methods are taken into use there really will be large number of people who will put the strongest competitor of their favourite candidate last on their ballot - just to make sure that she will not be elected. Government should thus be active and tell people that the voting method is good enough so that everyone can vote sincerely without the risk of helping the worst competitors when doing so. Unfortunately the remaining strategical voting issues in Condorcet methods leave space for all kind of stories and speculations about possible strategies. I hope the voters will not read this mailing list since they sure would get paranoid after only few mails :-).
But the defensive strategy criteria are very much based on real life need. That need, indicated by numerous conversaions with demoralized voters, led me to propose the criteria.
I support all efforts to reduce the strategic voting related problems. I do however believe that there is also an upper limit after which new additional techniques bring more harm than benefits.
Let's make some definitions
VM1 = Best voting method if all the votes are sincere
VM2 = Best voting method
VM3 = Voting method that is best in eliminating strategical voting possibilities
What I'm desperately trying to prove is that in the family of Condorcet based methods VM1 is closer to VM2 than the discussions at this mailing list indicate (maybe even the same). I do support theoretical studies on this topic, but to me the question what is the best practical method for certain purpose is different from the question what method theoretically best in some respect (e.g. in eliminating strategies) (not necessarily a practical need).
I think strategy elimination is important. Condorcet does already most of it. VM2 may add some useful defence mechanisms on top of that. VM3 is too much. I'm a bit cautious with some of the most complex and least practical strategy elimination proposals.
Possible problems of VM3 are unnecessary complexity and possibility of electing too often some other candidate than what VM1 (with sincere votes) would elect.
It is possible that VM3 is planned so well that when one sums up the impact of given strategical votes and VM3 behaviour, its results are practically equal to
what VM1 produces. In this case VM3 = VM2.
VM3 and VM2 may include recommendations to voters not to vote sincerely but to always use certain strategy when voting. Not a very nice property of a voting method but can be used if nothing better is available.
Another related deviation from the sincere voting of VM1 is that VM3 and VM2 may try to guess what voters mean. I mean that if with votes V method VM2 produces result R2, then VM1 (that is different from VM2) may produce result R1 that is different from R2. Maybe VM2 has corrected a strategy that voters applied when voting V. But maybe voters were sincere. In this case VM1 would have produced the best result and the result should be R1, not R2.
Must quit now. Will ask about Least Additional votes later. But it sounds like Dodgson, which doesn't do well by criteria, including, but not limited to, the defensive strategy criteria.
Close to that. It is actually MinMax with margins. People are too familiar with MinMax, so I wanted to give them few moments of fresh thinking before going back to their already well established opinions of MinMax. I think this new definition of MinMax may be better than the traditional one since it links the method to some concrete real life phenomena/needs ("additional votes", "mutiny elimination") and is easy to understand to normal people.
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