[EM] A few more poll comments

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

About the hypothetical polling with verifiable results: For one voter to 
deceive another voter about things like who will have a majority or who will 
outpoll whom, it would be necessary to for him to know something that the 
other voter doesn´t know. I can´t deceive you about something that you know 
about. And if I myself don´t know about it, then there´s no way for me to 
know that I´m deceiving you about it. And  it seems a necessary assumption 
that all voters have access to the same predictive information.

To the claim that a deceiver could harm his cause by deceiving his 
co-partisans, someone could answer: What if it´s known that Best won´t have 
a 1st choice majority, but might have a 1st choice plurality. And Worst 
might or might not have a 1st choice majority? Isn´t it then safe to 
bullet-vote for Worst in the poll, since there´s no danger of giving away a 
Best majority win? Sure, but Best could still have a 1st choice plurality, 
and if enough Worst voters randomly guess otherwise, Best could win--but not 
of  Best voters have been deceived into being convinced that Worst will 
outpoll best. Obviously, whatever undeceived strategy the Best voters are 
going to use, whether 0-info or probability-info, is better for their 
expectation-maximization than a strategy based on being deceived. And what´s 
better for them is better for you too, if you´re a Best-preferrer with 
preferences like theirs.

And, as I said, you don´t even know if your false voting for Worst is 
convincing the Worst voters of something untrue about the outcome.

So giving false poll answers doesn´t sound very profitable.

But if there were a poll-lying problem, it would just mean that knowledgable 
voters would disregard the polls.

One could suggest a scenario where each faction has its own pollsters whom 
it trusts. Voters tell the truth to their own pollsters, who never lie in a 
way that would hurt their faction. But voters may lie to other 
factions´pollsters, and pollsters may report false results that will help 
their own faction. That would become a mess in which, as I said, no one 
would take the polls seriously--just as no one should take polls seriously 
now.

Anyway, it´s really meaningless to discuss lying by poll-answerers without 
taking into account lying by those who count and report the polls. For the 
purpose of these comments I´ve falsely assumed that the polling uses 
verifiable balloting.

Using Condorcet for the election, or at least using pairwise-count for the 
(verifiable-balloting) poll would be much more convenient than having a 
whole series of Approval polls.

And the concern about poll-lying was explicitly based on the mistaken notion 
that Approval strategy needs polling. Approval voting is reliably informed 
by previous election results. And in the 1st Approval election, when no 
previous results exist, then Approval strategy can be o-info strategy 
(voting for the above-mean candidates) or probability-info strategy based on 
conversations, and assessments from writers or commentators whom one trusts, 
etc. A number of probability-info strategies have been described on EM. All 
the strategies that aren´t o-info and aren´t based on perceived certainties 
are probability-info strategies.

Mike Ossipoff

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