--- On Wed, 26/11/08, Jonathan Lundell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There's nothing
> *wrong* with voting insincerely (or, equivalently,
> strategically), in this sense; a voter has a right to do
> their best to achieve an optimum result in a particular
> context.----
I think it would be better not to classify "voting insincerely" and "voting
strategically" as equivalent.
For example in Approval some voter may estimate the popularity of all the
candidates and the expected behaviour of other voters and his own preferences
and interests, and then decides to fill the ballot in a certain way in order to
maximize the probability of reaching good results in the election. In this case
it may be best to say that the voter identified the best tactic to vote and
therefore voted strategically. But doing so was not insincere since that was
what all the voters were expected to do.
Some methods thus make the assumption that voters will find their best strategy
and then apply it while other methods may assume that voters will simply mark
their sincere preferences on the ballot (i.e. without considering how the votes
are counted and how they could influence the outcome by casting some specific
kind of vote).
(There is a difference between ballots that include falsified opinions an
ballots where the voter has just chosen one of the available different
alternatives that are all equally sincere. In Approval one could say that any
position of the approval cutoff is equally sincere as long as it separates a
set of better candidates from a set of worse candidates (or alternatively one
could require the cutoff to be in such place where there is a large gap between
the utilities of the approved and non-approved candidates). In rated and ranked
methods the sincere vote may be unique, and any deviation from that may be
considered a falsified vote / insincere voting.)
I think it depends on the society and its rules (and the method and election in
question) if insincere voting is considered to be "wrong" or not. In many cases
the society will benefit if insincere voting is generally not accepted.
(Strategic voting can be accepted in elections where strategic voting is the
"agreed" way to vote.)
Juho
P.S. Casting a ballot that deviates from the sincere _opinion_ may be a
different thing (=still sincere although strategic) than insincere _voting_
----
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