[EM] ignoring "strength of opinion"

rob brown rob at karmatics.com
Thu Dec 1 17:16:37 PST 2005


On 12/1/05, Paul Kislanko <kislanko at airmail.net> wrote:

Ah, but you contradict yourself. See below.
>
Sorry if you don't want me mentioning borda, but the only way to get around
> what you see as "wrong" is by doing exactly what borda does.  And that is
> bad.
>
> Borda isn't the only way to preserve rank differences pairwise.
>
> I didn't say it was.  I used it as a familiar and well understood example
of something that does that.  Anything that preserves such differences is
going to have similar problems.

> Condorcet allows people to never have to consider strategy when placing
> their vote. ( ... )
>
> Wouldn't it be "strategic" for a bloc to vote "Z>A" at the bottom of the
> ballot when they want neither Z nor A, but can use that to defeat A in any
> method that counts pairwise-matrix numbers instead of ballots?
>
> My wording was a bit sloppy, because it is true that condorcet SOMETIMES
can reward insincere voting.  It is not perfect.  It is, in my opinion,
really really close....close enough that insincere voting will not have a
significant effect on elections, and most importantly to me, will allow
middle ground candidates to be elected rather than forcing people into two
opposing clusters.

In most cases you will not gain much from doing what you describe, assuming
they don't actually prefer Z to A.  Only if Z, A and the preferred candidate
are in a condorcet cycle would that have any effect whatsover.  And if they
are in a condorcet cycle, that get's pretty hard to predict whether A or Z
is the biggest threat to the preferred candidate.  So I just don't see it
being a significant factor.
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