[EM] When sincere Approval is optimal

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

By the way, when I said that my definition of sincerity for criteria doesn't 
mention ratings, I _didn't_ mean that it doesn't apply to CR. It applies to 
all methods, as do my criteria. But it refers to voting pairwise 
preferences, by voting one candidate over another, which, by the definition 
of voting one candidate over another, means, in CR, rating one candidate 
over another.

As I was saying, in this and the previous posting I'm using "sincere rating" 
in CR (including Approval) to mean a rating that reflects the voter's actual 
valuation of the candidates, to the extent allowed by the balloting.

There are at least 2 situations in which a sincere Approval ballot is one's 
best strategy for expectation maximization:

1. The voter considers the candidates to be in two sets such that the merit 
difference within each set is negligible compared to the merit difference 
between the sets. Voting for the better-set candidtates is sincere,  and 
also maximizes expectation for that voter.

I claim that that's the situation that exists in our political system. My 
usual way of wording it is to say that there are  candidates who don't 
deserve a vote and shouldn't get one. The Democrats and Republicans. The 
less desirable of the two sets consists of them, and maybe sometimes some 
others.


2. It's a 0-info election. Voters have no information about the winnability 
of candidates, eachother's preferences, or the tie/near-tie probabiilties of 
candidates or pairs of candidates. Then, expectation maximization and 
sincere rating both mean voting for the above-mean candidates, by the usual 
interpretation of sincere rating in Approval.

In the previous posting, entitled "Comparison summary", I only discussed SU, 
because that's what had been discussed recently. So I should emphasize that 
the defensive strategy criteria are important to me also (though I've been 
saying that a lot in other postings): FBC, SFC, GSFC, WDSC & SDSC. As I said 
recently, CR, including Approval, meets FBC & WDSC. All Condorcet wv 
versions meet SFC & WDSC. SD, SSD, CSSD, BeatpathWinner, & Ranked-Pairs, in 
their wv versions, additionally meet GSFC & SDSC.

The defensive strategy criteria are important to me, because we all agree 
that it's important to get rid of the lesser-of-2-evils problem, to minimize 
the need for drastically insincere defensive strategy, and those criteria 
measure for that goal, and also for the goal of majority rule.

Democracy doesn't exist when voters need to abandon expression of what they 
want in order to help a lesser-evil.

Mike Ossipoff

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