All election methods have vulnerabilities. These monotonicity
failures may look bad on paper but in real life elections they are
typically not that harmful. If some IRV voter asks if he should vote
sincerely or falsify his vote somehow due to the non-monotonic
properties the general recommendation is anyway to vote sincerely. It
is not easy to use the monotonicity failures to intentionally improve/
falsify the results (in typical large public elections).
There are thus different kind of vulnerabilities. Some may make the
methods unusable while some are just theoretical vulnerabilities with
no significant practical impact on real life elections.
My favourite approach is to study and list all these properties and
then assess their impact in real life elections as sincerely as we
can (i.e. trying to avoid hiding the problems, exaggeration, negative
campaigns etc.). Maybe this one should be listed as one of the
vulnerabilities of IRV but as a relatively harmless one.
Juho
On Aug 9, 2008, at 21:55 , Kathy Dopp wrote:
On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Chris Benham
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Unfortunately it is true that a subset of voters can make their
sincere
first choice X lose by by top-ranking X *instead of top-ranking some
other candidate Y*, but NOT by top-ranking X instead of staying
home.
Can you imagine knowingly supporting a voting system where voters have
no idea how to rank their first choice candidate (first or last or in
between) in order to help their first choice candidate win?!
I.e. ranking one's first choice candidate LAST, may help one's first
choice candidate win, whereas ranking one's first choice candidate
FIRST will not.
IRV proponents seem to have nothing better to do than to try to screw
up our voting systems more than they are already screwed up.
So if Australians all jump off a cliff into an ocean full of sharks,
then the U.S. voters should too?
Chris, I'll never understand your thinking, thank goodness.
Kathy
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