Hello Eric,
I think many people might really use strategy that is harmful to them but looks promising at first sight.
They might falsely think like in the lines of the Borda method: "last position in the ballot gives least points"
Or in terms of ranking: "one negative point to the last candidate per each candidate that is ahead of her"
Maybe both "educated" and this kind of "uneducated" strategies will be used in real elections.
I think governments could well distribute some propaganda that encourages voters both to forget their uneducated strategies (because they just harm them) and at the same time maybe to forget also their intention to use the educated strategies (that might or might not work).
One more interesting category of human behaviour is the US presidential elections where considerable number of people vote for other than the two major candidates. This always happens although their vote will be lost and they could on the other hand influence the election results by voting one of the two main candidates. These people may either not understand that their vote is lost (in the sense of having some effect in the results) or maybe they understand this but anyway still want to show their sincere opinion or the fact that they don't like the major candidates at all. What I find interesting in this case is that these people would probably vote the same way also in Condorcet based elections, i.e. not applying any sensible strategy or simply voting sincerely. Also part of the supporters of the major candidates would vote sincerely even if there were possibilities to apply some strategies. Maybe the number of people behaving this way could be estimated based on this data from earlier elections and maybe with some opinion surveys.
Best Regards, Juho
On Mar 17, 2005, at 17:02, Eric Gorr wrote:
Juho Laatu wrote:
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.
I agree this is likely, but only if they did not prefer any other candidate to this strongest competitor.
If everyone ranked the strongest competitor below candidates they preferred less, it seems obvious they could turn a candidate they preferred less into the strongest competitor and potential winner and I fail to see how this could be a rational choice.
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