Let me clarify my thinking a bit (I hope) behind NESD and NESD*. NESD stands for "Naive Exaggeration Strategy ==> Duopoly."
NES means the voter strategy of 1) identify the "top two" candidates most likely to win. 2) Exaggerate your (otherwise honest) vote to rank one top and the other bottom. (With NESD*, unique-top; with NESD, permitted to be co-equal top.) It appears that, in the real world, this is a pretty close approximation of what a very large percentage of voters in large well publicized+polled elections actually do (it does not necessarily always make complete sense that they do that, but the data indicates they do it anyway). The D part means: if all (or a very large percentage) of voters exhibit NES behavior, then one of the top-two will always win (except in exceedingly unlikely "perfect-tie" scenarios). And in fact, the same winner will arise as in strategic plurality voting, so any system failing NESD or NESD* can be accused (perhaps not with full justification, but certainly with some) of being "equivalent in the real world" to plain plurality voting, and presumably leading of historical time to "duopoly" where voters effectively only get one of two choices every election. This severely diminishes voter choice and "democracy" if it happens (versus some system with more than 2 choices). It's an interesting property (or two properties) and I think worth consideration. You can now ask yourself other interesting questions, like "how can I design good voting systems passing NESD or NESD*?" etc. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
