Additionally, David said that it's reasonable to assusme a spatial ordering, and if there's a 1-dimensinal policy space, then the only voters who'd be indifferent between any candidates would be voters situated between them in policy space. The extreme voters in our examples would never be indifferent between any candidates. The A voters would never be indifferent between B & C. Though it isn't what VA is optimized for, it isn't quite true that, when nothing is known about the other voters, you have nothing to lose by randomly ranking all the candidates, though you don't have preferences between all of them. That's because when you do that, you might be one of the B voters in my 41,39,20 example, and you might be helping the A voters to make A win by insincere extension, voting C over B when they're indifferent between those 2. True, either way, the A voters aren't penalized & B isn't protected from defeat, so it's in a rather weak sense that you have something to lose from insincere extension. But for one thing, the A voters are dis-rewarded in the sense that they can't gain by the strategy, while they can lose by it just as you can (because it can help someone use the strategy against them). For another thing, this situation isn't what VA is optimized for. Earlier in this message, & in the previous one, I gave some reasons why insincere extension isn't a problem in VA. Mike
