The other main standard that people expressed was sincerity. A method should encourage sincerity. Then surely it shouldn't force insincerity. IRO advocates claim that their method lets you rank sincerely because your lower choices can't hurt your favorite. But that can be said of Plurality too. So far so good; does that mean that IRO & Plurality are better? No, because if you try to protect your 2nd choice from defeat because you need it to beat something worse, then that _can & often will_ defeat your favorite, when you misjudge & help that 2nd choice when you didn't mean to. That's really the whole strategy problem, isn't it? In Plurality that happens when you vote Clinton ovre your favorite by voting for Clinton instead of your favorite. In IRO that happens when you insincerely vote Clinton in 1st place so he won't be immediately eliminated. Blake's sincerity standard is about indifferent voters, when they know nothing about other voters. Are indifferent voters really important? I've discussed several reasons why that standard doesn't seem important, that interpretation of the sincerity standard: 1. The only CW who could be defeated by insinsincere extension would be a rather weak kind of CW whose election depended on lots of indifference. It would be a circular tie, except taht lots of people didn't give a damn. 2. Since anyone who might be CW must be considered a serious contender, the defeat of a CW by insincere extension, since it requires indifference about him, requires lots of voters who are indifferent between major contenders, or between a serious contender, the CW, and less major candidates. How likely? How important a problem if it happens? Defeat of a rather indifferent CW? 3. That indifference, on the scale that would be needed, suggests that the CW and the other candidate are virtually the same in the opinion of lots of people. How big a problem if one wins instead of the other, if they're that similar? 4. There won't be indifference, strictly speaking, by any spatial interpretation of an election. I've talked about how there won't be indifference with a 1-dimensional policy space. But what if there are several dimensions? How likely is it that, for many voters, 2 candidates will be exactly equally distant to each one of those voters? Forget it. So what we're really talking about is what really should have been a circular tie anyway, with no genuine CW, just someone who'd be BeatsAll winner if enough people truncate between roughly equidistant candidates--but then decide not to truncate after all. Again, big problem? Mike
