[EM] Complete voting

LAYTON Craig Craig.LAYTON at add.nsw.gov.au
Sun Dec 17 19:55:41 PST 2000


Mike wrote:

>A voter votes completely if he doesn't leave unvoted a sincere preference
that the balloting
>system in use would have allowed him to vote in addition to the preferences
that he
>actually did vote.

And earlier he wrote:

>Exactly the same situation with single-winner Cumulative.
>Not voting a preference between Gore & Bush because you want to
>vote only for Nader isn't insincere by my definition, because
>voting Gore over Bush isn't allowed in addition to voting Nader
>over Gore. The unvoted preferences can't be voted in addition to
>the voted one, and so there's no insincerity in not voting the
>unvoted one.
>
>One detail that should be specified for my definition is:
>voting a preference for X over Y means voting X over Y, as I've
>previously defined that.

Okay, changing from 'sincerely' to 'completely' does not alter the fact that
this definition is not applicable to some voting methods, and as such is not
appropriate for a criteria that should be universally appliable.  I'm not
sure how this works in relation to your more complete definition of sincere
voting earlier (you obviously need to have a definition of sincere
preference for your complete thingy to work), but it is at the very least
still problematic in Cumulative.  I think you may have misunderstood my
point about Cumulative; an election where you have a preference A>B>C=D, and
four points (votes) to distribute.  Is giving A four points a complete vote?
You are able, under the voting system, to indicate further sincere
preferences (by giving A 3 votes and B 1 vote).  Your definition gives
"complete vote" very specific properties, some of which are certainly not
relevant to the criteria.  It is not just about sincerity per se, the
definition needs to make sense in relation to all systems for the criteria
to mean anything.

Markus, in relation to your idea about sincerity, I have to disagree.
Bullet voting is sincere.  I agree with Martin about the
insincere-unstrategic issue. I think that there are four main types of
votes; sincere, sincere-strategic, insincere, and insincere-strategic.



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