---- >D- What is the voodoo math model that produces the fractions ??? Voodoo math? Try this:
In 2000, say that 6% of the voters actually liked Nader more than Gore (not an unreasonable number). Nonetheless, some of them may have given their one and only vote to Gore to make sure that Bush lost. So, say half of the Nader faction votes (insincerely) for Gore and half votes (sincerely) for Nader. Is this voodoo math? Or, if the voting machine (which I named Small Voting Machine only as a joke, although some are now using the name) used IRV, we know that sometimes in IRV giving more votes to the winner can cause him to lose, or taking votes away from a loser can cause him to win. Simple monotonicity violation. Some fraction of a camp might decide to vote insincerely to make their favorite win. If he lost ALL of his supporters he'd of course lose, even in IRV. But if just a few split off he might win. Remember that the idea of the voting machine is that if a faction has an incentive to follow an insincere strategy it assigns that strategy to the faction. Not because we actually want to use this machine, but to test whether you can still have an incentive to lie to the machine. If so, then strong FBC is impossible. Forest, as is usually the case, has explained it better than I have. Point is, a faction dividing up so that some members vote insincerely might be part of an optimal strategy in some voting systems. Although we'd prefer that the voting machine not use systems that encourage such strategies, to keep things as general as possible we're not completely disallowing such strategies at the moment. Especially since such "mixed strategies" play an important role in game theory. Or maybe game theory is just "voodoo math." Let's ask Russell Crowe, who won a Nobel Prize for it (this is after his stint as a Roman gladiator)... ;) Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
