On Jan 28, 2010, at 10:33 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jan 28, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Juho wrote:
On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
...
no, i think that if i can think up a negative number with greater
magnitude than anyone else, i should be able to single-handedly
scuttle a popular candidate.
Ok, you seem to think that one can not get rid of strategic voting
in typical (political I guess) elections.
i think there are ways of not encouraging strategic voting by not
punishing sincere voting. i'll defer to Arrow and the common wisdom
here that ultimately no system completely ditches strategic voting
under all conceivable conditions.
Yes. Arrow's statements of course leaves space for methods that are
strategy free enough to work in practice as if they were strategy
free. (I should btw have talked only about not getting rid of the
interest of voters to vote strategically.)
this is the strategy problem of Olympic judges (say of figure
skating or gymnastics or something with 8 judges holding up cards
rating the performance). there is a problem with adding sincere
ratings to insincere and exaggerated ratings. *especially* with a
secret ballot where no one needs to own up to and justify their
exaggerated rating.
In ski jumping the practice is that the highest and lowest score
will not be included in the sum of votes. This approach is
somewhere between mean and median. Maybe it has some benefits of
both. Judges come from different major ski jumping countries so
often one of the judges has a temptation to vote strategically.
Votes are public, so a strong bias will be visible.
and, again, my point is that with my secret ballot, and my suspicion
that political opponents may well be voting with exaggerated
ratings, that *i* would feel pressured to exaggerate *my*
preferences and that i might expect *any* savvy voter to do the
same. then, if everyone does that, the continuous gradation of
Range loses its meaning.
Yes, strategic voting escalates since it doesn't make sense to anyone
to let the strategists decide and let the sincere votes to be ignored.
with the exception of the strategy called "compromising". that
happens quite a bit when there are more than two candidates and
there are at least two candidates that go into the election nearly
evenly matched in pre-election polls.
it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free.
the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the
ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to,
the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent.
The basic Range strategy is unfortunately present in almost all
elections,
i don't see how it would be with a simple ranked-order ballot.
especially, if decided by Condorcet, you cannot exaggerate your
rankings. if you like A better than anyone and you like B better
than C, then there is nothing to be gained by any other ranking than
A>B>C. if you really hate C, you can rank a bunch of other
candidates you don't care about between B and C. but it doesn't
change how the election would work between the candidates A, B, and C.
Yes, the main rule in Condorcet is that sincere voting is enough.
Condorcet has also strategic vulnerabilities but in most environments
one can expect those problems to be so marginal that sincere voting
will be dominant and is the most practical "strategy" for all voters.
Juho
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