Winning votes Intuitive?

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

This message from Blake is only a repetition of his past arguments,
arguments that have been answered. I wouldn't bother to reply again
to what both I and Adam Tarr have already amply replied to, except that
there might be new members who haven't heard the previous
recyclings of these old margins arguments:

Blake said:

But I
think we agree that as voters understand the method better, any claimed
advantage of winning votes over margins, at least with regard to the
truncation-resistance issue, vanishes.

I reply:

If Blake is talking, there, to Adam, with whom he was discussing
that subject-line, I didn't notice Adam saying that wv has no advantage
over margins in regards to truncation.

Blake continues:

This is because, as I've
established, there's no strategic benefit to truncation over
order-reversal (or random ranking).

That's news to me, that Blake has establislhed that. Blake is
claiming that offensive truncation, in wv, has no advantage over
offensive order-reversal. Offensive order-reversal carries a big
penalty, and offensive truncation does not. How's that for a
strategic advantage.

If you attempt the offensive order-reversal strategy in wv, and
your intended victims don't rank your candidate, then your
offensive strategy will backfire by electing the candidate whom you
upranked in your order-reversal.

That's why I often point out that, in wv, offensive order-reversal
can only steal the election from someone who is trying to help you.

Blake continues:

[...]

My point is that even if you don't
know how other people are going to vote, truncation gives you no new
strategic opportunities, and so to voters who understand the methods,
there's no difference in strategy.

I reply:

The penalty of electing your last choice makes a difference in
strategy.

Blake explains for us the purpose of winning-votes :-)

the idea of winning votes is
that voters will either use truncation or give up strategy entirely in
exactly those situations where they should rationally rank randomly or
order-reverse.

I reply:

No, the idea of winning votes is that it meets a number of
criteria having to do with majority rule, and getting rid of
the lesser-of-2-evils problem. Also, as I explained in a recent reply
to a Condorcet objector, wv is the more ethical measure of
defeat-stength.

"that voters will either use truncation or give up strategy entirely in
exactly those situations where they should rationally rank randomly or
order-reverse."?  Well yes, it's an advantage of wv that wv deters
offensive order-reversal. But it isn't quite clear why Blake thinks
that we're trying to get voters to truncate, or why wv would do that.
As an offensive strategy, truncation doens't work in wv. As a problem,
it no longer exists.

That's important, because truncation has taken place in every rank
balloting that I've conducted or participated in, sometimes with
expressed offensive intent, but probably usually just because the
voter didn't want to bother ranking all the candidates.

Especially in a public election, there will be much truncation.
It would therefore be nice if truncation wouldn't cause the big
majority rule violations that it will often cause in margins methods,
or strategically force other voters to resort to insincere defensive
strategt.

Blake continues:

The presence of the partial ranking option on the ballot
seems to be there only to trick people into compromising their interests
in the hopes that some of those who are fooled deserve it.

I reply:

Voters shouldn't have to rank more candidates than they want to.
That's the reason for "the presence of the partial ranking option".
We're not trying to trick anyone into offensive truncation; we make
it clear repeatedly that it won't get you anywhere.

Blake continues:

I think we'd have to be pretty desperate before suggesting a method that
only works because people don't understand it. And so the argument is
that things are that desperate, that Marginal methods are too affected
by strategy to be usable.

I reply:

None of my criticisms of margins depend on an assumption that voters
are ignorant of strategy. In fact, the better they understand strategy,
the more of a mess a margins election would be. But I do agree with
Blakes final clause there: Margins methods are ridiculously
strategy-ridden. And wv advocates aren't the only people who say that.

Advocates of other methods, including Approval and IRV, often make
the same point--pairwise-count methods, they say, can be a strategic
mess. Of course they're right, except when wv virtually gets rid
of the strategy problems. I don't agree with IRV advocates about much,
but they're right about the strategic mess that pairwise-count methods
are (without wv).

Blake continues:

Now, many people would argue that any
Condorcet method will be unusable because of strategy. I think that is
false

I reply:

Yes, that's false, because that instability can be gotten rid of.
But margins doesn't get rid of it. I demonstrated here, not long
ago, that, with margins, there are plausible situations where
the only equilibria are ones in which defensive order-reversal is
being used. If that isn't instability, what is?

That problem of margins is shared by IRV and Plurality.

Blake continues:

, and that by many measures Condorcet criterion methods tend to be
the most strategy resistant of the non-random methods.

I reply:

Note that Blake's definition of Condorcet's Criterion doesn't
even apply to Approval or Plurality. So, for Blake, they are
non-Condorcet-Criterion methods by edict.

Blake says that he thinks that Condorcet Criterion methods, as a
group, are the most strategy-resistant methods, but he doesn't say
why he thinks that. And "strategy-resistant" is an odd term, implying
that Blake is talking about resistance to offensive strategy. Ok,
how would you use offensive strategy in Approval? Actually, in margins,
offensive truncation is a viable strategy, which is not the case in wv.
And in margins, offensive order-reversal isn't deterred as it is in wv.
That doesn't sound very "strategy-resistant".

Blake can be forgiven for his emphasis on strategy-resistance, because
that's the strategy emphasis of the out-of-touch authors that Blake parrots.

But
IRV and Plurality illustrate the uselessness of that approach:
With those methods, voters will often be forced to resort to defensive
strategy, in particular the defensive strategy of favorite-burial,
in order to protect a lesser-evil and prevent the election of someone
worse. Those methods create that defensive strategy need without anyone
using offensive strategy. Getting rid of that problem has nothing
to do with "resisting" a strategy.

In general, the genuine strategy problem is the problem of voters
feeling compelled to vote insincerely in order to protect a lesser-evil,
to enforce majority rule or to prevent the election of someone worse.


Blake continues:

This is because every example of truncation-resistance is an example
where the truncators could have got their way if they understood the
method better.

I reply:

...could have got their way, or could have suffered the penalty of
the election of their last choice, in return for their attempted
offensive order-reversal.

Mike Ossipoff





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