[EM] The wiki questionaire

[Chris Benham]

Mike,
You wrote:

> What's important about strategy is the mininimization of _need_ for 
> strategy. That's how strategy is important.
>
> In wv or MMPO, if you truncate to deter offensive strategy, the only 
> importance of that deterrence is that it keeps you from needing more 
> drastic defensive strategy (as you would need in Margins, for instance).
>
> I notice that Jobst, Kevin, and someone whose initials I didn't 
> recognize, strongly disagree with having AERLO as an option. 

In reference to strategy, you are always throwing around these IMO far 
too strong and emotive words "need" and "forced". Why not simply refer 
to "incentives"?

Regarding  AERLO, I agree with Jobst in being opposed to *explicit* 
strategy devices. But I'm not in principle opposed to allowing the 
voters to enter an approval cutoff in their
rankings which might, for "defensive strategists", perform a similar 
function. But if there is such an option, it should be something that 
makes sense to voters innocent of strategy and
it should preferably have some up-front function so that voters see it 
as important. It shouldn't be the case that "this is just in case 
there's a top cycle" and then there isn't one for a
very long time so most of the voters either don't bother or don't take 
it seriously.

Since Mike has stated that the purpose of  AERLO is  for  
"acceptable/unacceptable" voters to enter below the acceptable set of 
candidates, I suppose there's no reason not to
call it an "approval cutoff".  But I see a problem in justifying how it 
works. If  we say "This is so that if some voters don't like the result 
of the (first,'provisional') election, then they
can change their vote (for the second, 'final' election)" then this just 
prompts the natural question "How is that fair? If some voters can 
change their votes after the 'first election',
why can't other voters change their votes after the 'second election'?  
Why stop at only two elections?".  I  don't know any good answer to that.


Chris  Benham