[EM] Ossipoff: "strategizers can take advantage of sincere voters" with Range Voting?

[Warren Smith]

I think this is a wrongheaded view.  Ossipoff is falling into a mental trap here
and then figuring it provides a basis for saying Approval is superior to Range.

The argument presupposes the world is divided into some camps ("us" and "them") an
that the poor little honest voters are in one camp and the nasty strategic voters
are in the other, at which point the strategic ones win.

Bull.

In practice, there are honest & strategic voters in every camp and no
advantage can be taken if the honest/strategic fractions do not depend on
the camp.  Do they depend on the camp?  In the 2004 election,
they did not if the two camps were Bush & Kerry voters.
The "third party" voters (by which I mean, those giving a nonzero score to
somebody besides B&K), however, *were* distinctly less strategic than
the B&K voters.  (This is all based on my 2004 exit poll RV & AV study.)
So that would seem, by my opponent's reasoning, to mean the third parties
would be better off under approval than range voting.

Bzzz. Wrong.  Range Voting was far, far superior to Approval
from the standpoint of every third party in the 2004 US presidential election.
And the reason was the honest voters, not the strategic ones.

So this whole argument is just bunk in reality.

As for Schulze beatpaths being conjecturally "highly manipulable"
(or in general by the words "highly manipulable") what I mean
by that is that (perhaps) there often are small subsets of
voters, who, by changing their vote in retrospect, can make the election swing.
I do not claim to have any, e.g. computer simulation backing of this feeling,
though.

--Warren D Smith.