Blake reply

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I'd said:

>Maybe there are 20 or 30 candidates, and the voter has other things
>to do.

Blake then said:

So, they have time to form an opinion, but not to mark it?


I reply:

Yes, you've got it. They have years to form opinions, but maybe they
have to return home soon, get to some other engagement, and so they
don't have time to rank 40 candidates.

Blake continues:

You've talked about how terrible non-strategic truncation is in
margins

I reply:

Blake is addicted to exaggerated dramatic language, when referring to
what someone else has said.

Blake continues:

, because it might defeat a sincere CW.  This means that the
candidate is only the sincere CW because of preferences that either
voters can't be bothered to express, or they refuse to express because
they find the sincere CW so contemptible.

My point is, that such a candidate really doesn't have much of a
claim.  I think that it is reasonable to ignore preferences that a
voter can't be bothered to vote.  They don't seem like very reliable
preferences.

I reply:

If they truncate because they don't have time to rank 40 candidates,
or because they consider unacceptable some candidates among whom they
have preferences, perhaps wanting to make a statement, the effect
is still the same as if it were strategically-intended truncation.

I guess Blake missed my previous reply to this same question. The
real problem is that majority rule is violated, and the members of
that majority need a more drastic insincere strategy in order to
protect majority rule.

In my Margins examples, both the truncation example, the order-reversal
example, and the non-reversal-falsification example, a majority have
ranked B over A. A has a majority against him. In the "truncation"
example, B doesn't have a majority against him.

Now, whether the A voters, in the "truncation" example, didn't rank
B because they're indifferent (so B then isn't sincere CW), or whether
it was because they want to make a statement that though B is better than
C, neither is acceptable, or whether they did it with strategic intentions, 
hoping to make A win--that's not as important as the
problem for majority rule, and the strategy need that it creates for
the B>A voters.

Steve suggested the possibility of defining SFC so that it doesn't
refer to a sincere CW. He suggested something along the lines of saying:

If a majority of all the voters prefer A to B, and vote sincerely, and
if A has no majorities against him, than  B shouldn't win.

I preferred to leave the CW wording in, though, because that made use
of a familiar kind of situation in which the above requirements are
met, as long as there's no falsification. Steve's wording would be
simpler, but mine relates more obviously to familiar things like the
sincere CW. Maybe Steve's version, quoted above, should be called SFC2.

But the CW is someone who can't have a majority agains him if there's
no falsifiction, and so I wanted to word SFC as I did, so that it
would be about a familiar way in which Steve's conditions are met.

Any method that meets BC meets SFC2, and all the other majority
defensive strategy criteria.

Mike Ossipoff



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