Is winning votes intuitive?

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I'd asked:

>Ok, winning in violation of majority rule, by truncation, in the way that
>can happen in margins methods--how will that happen in wv methods
>by flipping a coin?

Rob replied:

Say a voter's sincere vote is A>B>C and he could gain some advantage under
margins by insincerely voting A>B=C. Under winning-votes, all he has to do 
is
flip a coin. If it's heads, he votes A>B>C; if it's tails, he votes A>C>B.
Doing this gives him exactly the same expected outcome as would voting A>B=C
under margins.

I reply:

No, it isn't the same. Order-reversal in wv carries a special kind
of risk that truncation in margins doesn't have, for one thing,
and is more easily thwarted.

In margins, the truncation could cause his candidate to win instead
of the sincere CW, who'd have won under sincere voting.

But, in wv, why should he flip a coin to decide whether or not to
order-reverse? One would expect that if he wanted to steal the
election, and didn't care about the risk, he'd just order-reverse.
Your coin-flipping results in a half-size number of strategizers,
who'd be less likely to make a strategic circular tie.

What this amounts to is that, in wv, he could still try to steal
the election from the sincere CW, but by offensive order-reversal
instead of by truncation.

I don't deny that. In wv country, we make him go to greater extremes,
and go out on a limb for the loot.

But, as you said, the value of that depends on whether or not
you're right to say that voters who'd truncate would be just
as likely to try offensive order-reversal. You haven't shown that,
and you've been given good reasons why it isn't so.

Anyway, even if that voter tries offensive order-reversal in wv,
he's more easily thwarted than he would be if he'd done truncation
or order-reversal in margins. In wv, offensive order-reversal
won't help your candidate if a majority prefer someone to him
and rank that someone but don't rank your candidate. In margins,
defensive strategy against truncation takes the form of promoting
a compromise to 1st place, and defensive strategy against order-reversal 
takes the form of voting a compromise over your favorite.
Just as margins doesn't have wv's GSFC guarantee, margins also
doesn't have wv's SDSC guarantee.

Rob LG continues:

Besides, generally, when voting A>B=C would help, voting A>C>B
would help even more, which would work just fine under winning-votes.

I reply:

No, it wouldn't work as fine in wv as it does in margins, because
it's thwarted be mere defensive truncation, and, if thwarted
it backfires for the reverser.

Rob LG continues:

As Blake
has put it before, winning-votes is "easy to get around".

I reply:

That's like saying that locking your front door is easily gotten
around by someone who smashes a window and sets off an alarm to
get in.

Rob continues:

Now one might say
that voters will be too dumb to flip a coin or too principled to engage in
strategic reversal. Fair enough. If I were sure of that, I'd probably 
support
winning-votes too, despite its lower social utility. But like I've said, I
prefer to be pessimistic and realize that voters will likely catch on.

I reply:

Flipping a coin has nothing to do with order-reversal. One can do
that without flipping a coin. You're sure that people would turn
out to be ruthless preference-reversers, but you never answered
my comment that to organize that mass-reversal would require a
big public campaign that would surely be noticed by the would-be
victims, who then would decline to help the reversers' candidate
, resulting in the reversal only making the outcome worse for
the perpetrators.

I'd said:

>When you said that wv doesn't guarantee anything that margins
>doesn't guarantee, I told you of some guarantees, which I call
>SFC & GSFC.

Rob LG replied:

Yes, and Blake and I have explained patiently why, in our opinions, those
guarantees are ultimately useless, even if they sound attractive.

I reply:

If the explanation you're referring to is what I've found in this
message, it may be very patient, but I've told you why it doesn't
show what you want it to. Even if you believe that margins' truncators
will all become wv's order-reversers, they'll be much more easily
thwarted in wv. And the experience will deter them from trying
it again.

I've only replied to a fraction of this message, but I've got to
quit now. I'll continue this reply tomorrow.

Mike Ossipoff


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