This mail was just a draft that I sent by mistake. It contains still errors and is badly formulated, so you an ignore it. I'll send a new one in a day or two.
Sorry about the confusion, Juho On 29.5.2012, at 11.30, Juho Laatu wrote: > Now I have a reasonable definition of Mike Ossipoff's strategy that is > supposed to be valid for all Condorcet methods (and even for all FBC failing > methods). The strategy is "if there are winnable unacceptable candidates and > winnable acceptable candidates, find that winnable acceptable candidate that > is most likely to win all the unacceptable candidates, and rank him alone at > top". Here use of terms acceptable and unacceptable means that the voter has > some higher than marginal interest to make one of the acceptable candidates > win instead of the unacceptable ones. > > Let's study it in the US framework. I'll use the Republican candidate, the > Democrat candidate and Nader to describe what could happen. > > The key idea of the strategy is that the voter can bury his non-winning > favourites (Nader) without concern since they will not win anyway. The > strategy says that the voter may bury also winnable favourites if another > acceptable candidate is more likely to win all the unacceptable ones (not > covered in this example). The reason why this burial might benefit the voter > is that there might be an intentional strategic loop caused by other > strategists (Republicans), and that strategic loop could make R win instead > of D. Alternatively there might sometimes be also a loop caused by sincere > votes. > > I'll address some reasons why the strategy might not be on optimal strategy > for real life elections to be applied always in all Condorcet elections. > > 1. Nader supporters would lose the benefits of ranking their favourite first: > There are benefits to voting for your favourites also when those candidates > can not win. The Nader voters have obviously already today some reasons to > vote for Nader in Plurality elections although Nader has no chances to win. > The voters maybe want to lift the political weight of Nader and his opinions, > or make him or his followers win in some future election, or they may just > want to carry a message that they do not like either one of the current major > parties. They do so although their vote is likely to help the Republican > candidates (the worst winnable candidate). If the election method would not > punish them as much as Plurality does (e.g. Condorcet), Nader voters would > probably be even more interested to show support to their favourite. It thus > doesn't sound like the Nader voters would be happy to bury their favourite if > the election method was changed from Plurality to Condorcet. In real life > elections optimality of a stratgey is not measured only in terms of who is th e > winner of this election but in some much wider sense. > > 2. The marginality of the benefits: > If the Republicans decide to strategically bury the Democrat under Nader, > when Republicans have 48% support, Democrats 42% and Nader 10%, more than > 42/48 of the Republican voters should follow the planned strategy and vote R > > N > D. This is not probable. So the Nader voters have no reason to worry. > The benefits of ranking their favourite first will be more important than the > need to defend against a possible strategy that is not likely to materialize. > ---- > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
