[EM] Re: serious strategy problem in Condorcet, but not in IRV?

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear Eric, et al

>Voting sincerely is always in the interest of an individual. For in a 
>collection of people, it is the group preference that is important. 
>If enough individuals are not prepared to accept a legitimate loss, 
>the voting system will not matter.
>
>Only in those cases of dictatorships, etc. do pure individual 
>interests become more important.


	I don't think that I agree with this. For one thing, there is the
possibility than an individual actually does have a very clear personal
interest in the election of a particular candidate. Or that they perceive
themselves to have such an interest.
	Another possibility is that they are so sure that they are right about
what is good for society, and the supporters of the other candidate are
dead wrong, that they will decide that the ends justify the means, and use
offensive strategy.


>I still don't understand why it would be so unsettling from the 
>aspect of an election method.
>Considering that all elections methods can be manipulated in some 
>form or another, what good is it to remind us that society can break 
>down and make the election method irrelevant by subverting the 
>process?


Well, I find that fairly disturbing in itself, of course. But perhaps what
worries me about this particular type of scenario is that IRV turns out to
be less manipulable that Condorcet.


>Of course such flaws should not be ignored, but the flaw that James 
>was pointing out actually lies utterly outside the scope of an 
>election method and inside of the scope of what it means to be a 
>moral/ethical participant in an election.


This is not a dichotomy that voting systems designers have the luxury of
making. If you put in place a system that works great as long as people
vote sincerely, and it works worse in practice than another system that
doesn't produce as-good results given sincere votes, then the people who
implemented the voting system are partly to blame for their lack of
foresight.

Take cardinal ratings, for example. It would be a pretty decent voting
method if you could expect people to vote sincerely in any meaningful way,
but that is just not realistic. A rational voter will tend to give any
given candidate either the highest or the lowest possible score to
maximize their voting power, and so the end result is supposed to be
roughly equivalent to approval.

I'm not saying that approval is so bad, but the point is that any serious
voting system theory (for public elections, at least) expects voters to
try to maximize their voting power, and hence vote strategically. Voting
systems are designed around the principle that they should produce good
results if used this way.

The process of American government now is hardly characterized by very
scrupulous people who refuse to unfairly take advantage of loopholes in
the system. There is no reason to expect that it would suddenly become so
under Condorcet. (I usually think about American government when I think
of government, because I have lived in America all my life. I imagine that
this applies to most governments, but I'm not as qualified to say.) A good
system is one that would minimize the ability of the raging self-interest
of politicians and power groups to subvert the democratic process to the
point of useless absurdity.


>This is fundamentally different from a flaw one can find within 
>IRV...where even if one assumes people are perfect and have strictly 
>voted their sincere preferences, IRV can select an obviously the 
>wrong winner.


I agree with this. I trust Condorcet to pick a fair winner when people
vote sincerely, but I do not trust IRV to do so.

James