[EM] Approval Strategy (was the Allure of IRV)

Adam Tarr atarr at purdue.edu
Sun Apr 28 17:15:31 PDT 2002


>(A classic 3-way race was the 1998 gubernatorial race in Minnesota.
>Ventura, the Dem, and Repubiican were all in the vicinity of 30%.)

In an approval election, the polls won't look quite like that, since 
presumably the pollsters will ask "who will you vote for?" which could be 
more than one candidate.  So this will change the ways the polls appear, 
which will change who the frontrunners appear to be, which will change 
people's impression of which "lesser evil" they need to approve, which will 
change the polls, and so on.  This process will tend to stabilize due to 
the presence of Nash equilibria, and these equilibria nearly always favor 
the Condorcet winner.

Basically, what I am arguing is that the movement of candidates in the 
polls will constitute a crude form of DSV (declared strategy voting) with 
Approval, or non-cumulative repeated approval balloting as Forest and Rob 
LeGrand would call it.

-Adam

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