[EM] Re: simulating an Approval campaign/election

[Forest Simmons]

> From: Russ Paielli <6049awj02 at sneakemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] Re: simulating an Approval campaign/election

> Rob LeGrand honky1998-at-yahoo.com |EMlist| wrote:
>> You're simulating a DSV (Declared-Strategy Voting) election with
>> Approval.  My current research is on just that topic, though I'm
>> also interested in using DSV with other point-count systems such as
>> plurality, Borda and several others.  That Approval strategy is
>> identical to strategy A in the 3-candidate case.
>

Russ asked:

> Interesting. Do you mind if I ask why you are interested in
> Declared-Strategy Voting as opposed to Undeclared-Strategy Voting?
>

Rob can give you his own reply on this, but here is mine:

Read Lori Cranor's dissertation on Declared Strategy Voting. [Just Google 
"Lori Cranor" or "Declared Stratetgy Voting".]

The original idea was to have voters submit their preferences (i.e. 
ordinal rankings of the candidates) and also their own strategy for 
plurality voting given partial results (the plurality totals for the 
ballots counted before theirs), and have the computer implement their 
strategy as their ballot came along for incorporation into the tally.

This idea might have been inspired by the U.S. Presidential election which 
is a plurality election in which voters on the West Coast can wait for 
partial results to come in before deciding how to vote.

Later the original idea was modified by using a common (near optimal) 
strategy for everybody.

Finally, batch mode was introduced to take out the arbitrariness of the 
order of processing of the ballots.

Rob and I felt that DSV would be more stable when based on Approval rather 
than Plurality.  His simulations have borne this out.  Furthermore 
Approval Strategy A is much, much simpler than the complex strategy needed 
for Plurality (which involves calculating intersections of normal 
distributions based on ever evolving estimated parameters).

It is important to note that the US presidential election is a kind of 
biased (towards the West Coast) DSV election.  And since DSV Approval 
does yield the CW when there is one, adoption of Approval in the U.S. 
Presidential election would almost certainly result in a win by the CW 
when there was one, unless the East West bias was too great.

This could be improved upon by having all voters with SSN's ending in 
(say) 5736 vote two days before the rest of the voters, and the results 
announced immediately. (The special number would be drawn anew for each 
election.)

Forest