[EM] Probability of losing a sincere Cond. Winner

Elisabeth Varin/Stephane Rouillon stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca
Thu Nov 28 22:04:35 PST 2002


Adam,

you make a lot of sense to me.
I might soon rally to most of your arguments...

Steph.

Adam H Tarr a écrit :

> >With my scenario, I would need to track and convince 11% of the 18%
> >potential truncaters in order to steal the strongly supported CW with
> >(wv) (more than half).
> >
> >With your scenario, you would need to track and convince 47% of the 49%
> >potential truncaters in order to steal the poorly supported CW with (rm)
> >
> >and 48% of the 49% potential truncaters (almost all of them) in order to
> >steal the poorly supported CW with (margins).
>
> Well, I had cooked things to give Ralph just about the minimum support to
> make the example work.  I could just as easily cook it the other way,
> just by strengthening Ralph's faction:
>
> 49%: George>Al>Ralph
> 6%: Al>George>Ralph
> 6%: Al>Ralph>George
> 39%: Ralph>Al>George
>
> Note that Al is still the CW and still has a majority over every
> candidate -- I haven't changed the fundamentals of the situation at all.
>
> Now, only 25% of the 49% in the George>Al>Ralph faction need to truncate
> to foul up the results.  Thats comparable (favorably comparable actually)
> to the 11% of 18% that you cited.  If I really wanted to skew the results
> here, I could set it up so you only needed around 7% of the George
> faction to truncate.  Again, I could do this without fundamentally
> changing the nature of the election; Al would still be a CW with majority
> support over the candidates on either side.  So really, we're just
> talking about an artifact of the example I chose.
>
> The more important issue is that it's very easy for these problems to
> crop up in margins, and it's easy to recognize them when they do, and
> it's easy to foul up the results just by truncating (which is a very
> natural thing for the voter to do).  In the winning votes examples, the
> problems only show up when there's a lot of truncation to start with, and
> then they only show up in a pretty fractured race where it would probably
> be hard to tell whether truncation will help or hurt you.
>
> -Adam
>
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