At 04:19 PM 1/7/2007, Juho wrote: >It is also possible that the three leading candidates would come from >the same party. [etc.]
I find it odd that IRV proponents would claim that IRV can save money by eliminating the need for primaries, and eliminating primaries could make more likely the conditions under which IRV would select a winner against the preference of a majority. As to false polls misleading voters, if an election is close enough between three "frontrunners" I don't think it is at all obvious how voters will behave. The false poll could backfire, motivating more voters to bullet vote. After all, that is one of the rational strategies, and it directly contradicts the vote suggested by what was claimed here to be standard Approval strategy. I would prefer to think of Approval Voting *method* and then strategy as a twist on this. The basic method is to select and vote for all candidates who one judges as acceptable as winners. This is why it is named "Approval." If voters are fully honest in this, and make reasonable accomodation for the views and satisfaction of others (In other words, A is my favorite, but I know that B is preferred by many who don't like A so much, and I think of B as a reasonable choice for the office as well), then the method clearly works to find a good winner. One way to describe the process simplifies it by placing candidates on a linear spectrum and setting an Approval cutoff. In Range, this has a specific meaning.... I'll call the Approval cutoff the AC. However, the reform would be coming into a contentious arena, where people are accustomed to fighting for their favorite, even if the preference is actually small. They aren't going to move to Canada if B wins. They aren't going to need medication for depression, at least not for that reason.... So then comes strategy. Who are the likely frontrunners? The voter needs to know this because not voting for a frontrunner is likely to be a wasted vote. By definition. If the frontrunners are clear, and there are two of them, the strategy is obvious, and is what has been recommended. If there are three, i.e., the election is reasonably close to a three-way tie, in expectation, then one has a choice: Set the AC such that one of the three is approved, then add any candidates preferred to that one. or Set the AC such that two of the three are approved, then add any candidates preferred to that one. For a poll to move a candidate from not-close to frontrunner status, it would have to be drastically distorted. As I've mentioned, there are more subtle, more serious, and less provable forms of lying than this. I really don't think it's a matter for special concern. As I mentioned, it could backfire. We don't know whether distorted polls like this would improve or hurt a candidate's chance of success, because only one of the possible effects was considered, one which is thought to move the result in a direction favoring those who distorted the polling. We would also have to consider the effects which could move the vote in the opposite direction. Polls would not seriously affect the internal Range rating which underlies Approval strategy. My impression of the desirability of a candidate winning does not depend sensitively on what others think. I want a candidate to be broadly acceptable, but the difference between, say 40% acceptable and 60% acceptable would not have a large effect on my opinion of the candidate. That is, very low acceptability *would* lower my rating, and very high acceptability would raise it, but the midrange is of little effect. In the polling fraud scenario, the fraud really only nudges the relative relationships of three candidates who are probably about equally acceptable. I really doubt that it would cause me to shift my vote. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
