On Aug 27, 2010, at 3:39 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: > > > On Aug 27, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > >> On Aug 27, 2010, at 12:48 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: >>> >>> with Score and Approval, it's easy to mark your favorite candidate >>> (Score=99 or Approval=1). and we know that Satan gets Score=0 or >>> Approval=0. then what do you do with other candidates that you might think >>> are better than Satan? that question has never been answered by Clay. and >>> any answer must be of a strategic nature. >> >> That is, to my mind, a fundamental problem with cardinal-rating >> systems--approval, borda, range, etc. Except for some trivial cases (notably >> two-candidate elections), the voting act is necessarily a strategic exercise. > > in my opinion, if you can break down a multi-candidate election into > two-candidate elections where the end result would not be different (the > Condorcet winner would be elected) then i think you've gotten past the burden > of strategic voting. > > in my opinion, when Candidate A is preferred by a majority of voters to > Candidate B, then, if Candidate B is elected, some kind of anomaly or > pathology (that might encourage one to vote strategically in the future). > >> With an ordinal method (IRV, Condorcet (though one could, I suppose, specify >> a non-ordinal cycle breaker), Bucklin) it's at least possible (and usually a >> good idea) to cast a sincere ballot. > > i just think that the strategy of swinging an election from the Condorcet > winner into a cycle is just a risky strategy. you never know who will come > out on top; your worst enemy might just as well as the centrist may or as > well as your candidate. with something like Schulz (or Ranked Pairs which > does not result in a different candidate with a Smith set of 3, and bigger > than 3 seems to me even more unlikely than that of getting a cycle anyway), > you are emphasizing more decisive elections in settling the ambiguity of a > cycle. > > say Ranked Pairs was the law, what kind of realistic strategizing can a party > or group of candidate supporters do? that example of tossing a close election > between RC (for radical center) and M (the centrist candidate who is also the > Condorcet winner if sincere ballots are cast) is, in my opinion, too > contrived to be a secure strategic guidance. any strategy that can just as > well backfire, is no strategy.
Let me be a little more clear. A voter, or group of voters, can always strategize (except in the case of a two-candidate plurality election, or perhaps a probability-based rule). Many voters are constitutionally inclined to strategize, and they're not necessarily good at it or rational about it. So I doubt we'll eliminate strategy with any of the methods that get discussed here. My objection to cardinal-rating methods is that they don't just encourage strategic voting: strategy is required. If I top-rank my favorite, and bottom-rank my least favorite, then the question of what to do with any candidates in between is a strategy question pure & not so simple. >> Why the latter is a good thing is a separate discussion... > > why casting a sincere ballot is a good thing or not? i would be interested > in reading such a discussion. and, maybe even, piping in. By "sincere" here I mean "strategy-free" (the ballot, not the counting method). I'm sure we don't all mean the same thing by this. Here I mean something like: a ballot informed only by the voter's preferences over candidates, and independent of knowledge or conjecture about the preferences, behavior or possible strategies of other voters. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
