[EM] Rankings made by another method

[James Gilmour]

> <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk> writes:
> >What is sincere (= will best achieve the desired
> >result = election of most preferred candidate) in one voting system

James Green-Armytage  Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 4:07 AM 
> 
> This isn't how I generally understand the concept of sincere 
> voting. In a ranked ballot system, I would hold sincere 
> voting to the following
> definition: 
> If you rank candidate A over candidate B, that means that in 
> an election only between A and B with no third option, you 
> would vote for A. If you rank candidate A equal to candidate 
> B, that means that you would not show up to vote in an 
> election between A and B with no third option, or, I suppose, 
> that you might show up and vote for both of them, whatever 
> that might accomplish.
> 
> Anything else seems to me to fit under the category of 
> strategic voting rather than sincere voting. Note that I'm 
> just talking about ranked ballots here. Definitions of 
> sincere voting for approval and plurality are not quite as 
> clear to me, in fact I'm not sure that such definitions can 
> be firmly established.

Your definition relies on the answer to a question that is asked only very rarely, and is never
asked in a real election.  (It was asked in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, shortly after the
two elections to the Scottish Parliament, but that is exceptional.)  In a real election the voters,
or at least those who are awake, will always take into account any effects inherent in the
arithmetic of the voting system being used for that election.  It was for this reason that I
suggested it would not give very useful results to take ballots recorded for one voting system and
count them by a different voting system.  It would still not be useful if the ballots were marked
sincerely (ie sincerely as determined by the unasked question) because such ballots might well not
produce the result the voters wanted.  So you have still discovered nothing useful.  Worse, you have
probably misled yourself.
James Gilmour