On May 1, 2009, at 6:02 AM, Raph Frank wrote:
2009/5/1 James Gilmour <[email protected]>:
One problem with abandoning LNH is that it opens the way for
strategic voting, that is, when a voter ranks the candidates in
some
order other than the sincere 'first to last' order of preference
because the voter knows that some feature of the voting system will
enhance the changes of the real high preferences being elected if
the rankings marked on the ballot are distorted in a particular
way.
Unfortunately, strategy is often a part of methods that encourage
compromise.
Part of the point of PR, it seems to me, is to represent the voters,
or groups of voters with similar views, as accurately as possible, and
to push compromise to the resulting legislative body, where
compromising can be worked out dynamically one decision at a time,
with discussion and analysis.
Forcing the voters to make a rather "blind" compromise in advance
through strategic voting may be a necessary evil for single-seat
elections, but I don't agree with the notion that we ought to
encourage it in a PR system.
However, the suggest modification to STV doesn't actually break the
LNH effect. There is no disadvantage to ranking all of the
candidates.
There would be strategy for the approval ballot though.
The strategy is effectively identical in both versions, despite the
difference in form. That is, in both your mechanisms it seems apparent
on the face of it that a voter would not have a motivation, strategic
or otherwise, to choose a different approval set in the two methods.
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