[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Juho]

On Apr 23, 2007, at 17:40 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote:

>> Range is expressive and it is able to treat these two different  
>> types  of "Pro Wrestlers" differently. Its problem is that it in  
>> practice  easily becomes Approval (only min and max values used)  
>> in competitive  elections.
>
> does it?
> I have seen arguments stating that a knowledgeable voter would  
> alter there preferences in this manner. But I am unsure if this  
> would happen in the reality of a large scale (>10^5 voters) election.

Let's say that in the U.S. presidential elections roughly 48% of the  
voters vote D=9, R=7, PW=1 and roughly 48% vote R=9, D=7, PW=1.  
Either D or R wins. In the next elections the Democrats notice the  
possibility of strategic voting and advice their supporters to vote  
D=9, R=0, PW=0. In these elections Democrats win. In the third  
elections Republicans have learned a lesson and now recommend their  
voters to vote R=9, D=0, PW=0. Now the election is in balance again,  
but the method has in practice reduced to Approval (actually  
Plurality in this example).

This strategy doesn't require the voters be rocket scientists.  
Probably the strategies would not spread as described above. Maybe  
there just would be discussions between voters and in the media and  
all parties would be impacted in roughly same speed. In competitive  
elections it is quite possible that majority of voters would not stay  
"sincere" but would vote in Approval style. Once strategic voting  
becomes wide enough to be meaningful to the end result, voting  
sincerely could be commonly seen as "donating the victory to the  
strategists". A key property of this evolution process is that those  
parties and individuals that are strategic will have more voting  
power than others (this breaks the possible balance of having same  
percentage of strategic voters in each party).

I think the size of the election doesn't influence much on if voters  
become strategic. I think it is more like a balance of media / yellow  
press interest, strength of rumours, overall requirement of "good  
moral" in the society, and (maybe most importantly) the level of  
competitiveness in the elections in question.

Juho



		
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