[EM] strategy problem

[James Green-Armytage]

Forest wrote:
>Here's another possible solution:
>All voters fill out ranked preference ballots.  In addition, each strategy
>minded voter with the interest and patience fills out a supplemental
>ballot, ranking pairs of candidates thusly:
>{A,B}>{A,C}>{B,C}
>[In the California gubernatorial race there would be lots of truncation.]
>Use a respectable Condorcet method to pick a finalist pair from among
>those so ranked.
>Then use the standard ranked preference ballots to decide the election
>between the two members of the finalist pair.

I reply:
Forest, I think that you are looking in some interesting directions here.
Something occurred to me about this proposal, though. It seems that the
most obvious strategy for most voters would be to prefer a finalist pair
consisting of their favorite candidate plus one other candidate who they
are fairly sure would lose in the final vote. What would the effect of
this be? Something tells me that it would get a little messy. Also, the
fact that 99% of the possible combinations in a serious multi-candidate
election wouldn't even appear on most voters' ballots would probably be a
fatal problem in itself, unless some kind of shorthand notation which
could be found to prevent this.

my best
James