[Election-Methods] Bullet Voting in the wider media

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 08:34 PM 10/7/2007, Jonathan Lundell wrote:

>The term "insincere" is an unfortunate shorthand for something other
>than the usual dictionary meaning. In this form of election, I take
>it to mean voting, for strategic reasons, for other than the voter's
>n favorite candidates, assuming that the voter approves of at least n
>candidates for the office

"Approves of" is undefined. The voter bullet votes. That only 
indicates approval of one candidate.

Now, I have not spent much time with multiwinner elections. Yes, this 
article was about elections where there are n winners, but I'll look 
at one with two winners and so the voter has 2 votes. there are three 
candidates:

Abraham Lincoln
Genghis Khan
Adolf Hitler.

so to speak.

Now, some elections have a threshold. If you don't get a certain 
percentage of the vote, you are not elected; there will perhaps be a runoff.

The voter prefers Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, but detests both.

Are we saying that a bullet vote for Abraham Lincoln is insincere? 
Why? The voter has essentially set an approval cutoff between Abraham 
Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. In this case, that isn't even questionable, 
it is quite sincere.

What bullet voting means, if deliberate, that the voter has such a 
strong preference for the favored candidate winning that the voter 
does not want to support any other candidate against him. While not 
as drastic as the example I gave above, it merely indicates a strong 
preference for the single candidate, strong enough that the voter is 
willing to give up influencing a second seat. What's insincere about that?

There is a contradiction set up in every discussion I have seen of 
the topic of strategic voting in Approval (and similar arguments are 
made with Range):

1. There is a voter who approves of two candidates
2. But only votes for one because the voter wants that one to beat the other.

Ahem. Those are two contradictory conditions! Part of the problem is 
the use of the term "approval." I was just reading Voting Matters and 
discover that I'm not the first person to suggest that we are talking 
about voting, not approving. I might vote for someone I rather 
heavily disapprove of, if I have no better practical option. A Nader 
supporter might vote for Gore, even if he thinks that Gore is just as 
much a tool as Bush, for there are other issues, such as Supreme 
Court appointments, etc.

My point is that a voter can set an approval cutoff anywhere the 
voter pleases, and there is nothing insincere about it, in the 
ordinary sense, nor, in fact, in the technical voting sense. What has 
happened is that terms and measures developed for ranked methods are 
being applied to cardinal methods. In a ranked method, "insincere" 
has a clear meaning: preference reversal. That's easy to define! But 
preference reversal never benefits the voter in Approval, nor in Range.

However, those who are actually advocating a ranked method, such as 
"Instant Runoff Voting," can't stand the idea that Approval is not 
"vulnerable" to insincere voting, so they must extend the definition 
of "insincere" to include something else. Basically, they posit an 
approval cutoff of their own, such that the voter "approves of" two 
candidates, but only votes for one. And then they call this an 
"insincere vote."

Now, unless the voter is merely lazy, we have to say that the voter 
voted for the candidate the voter preferred; that the voter placed 
his approval cutoff between the two candidate utilities. There is 
*nothing* insincere about this, and no way to truly apply the concept 
of tactical voting to it. There is no preference reversal.

Now, there is the reverse situation: the voter has a preference 
between two candidates, but approves both. What I find amazing is 
that critics of Approval will consider this as tactical voting as well.

"Bullet Voting" Bad.
"multiple approvals for other than clones" Bad.

Bottom line: not the method on my agenda: Bad.

I'm going after the Tactical Voting reference in the Wikipedia 
article. It's not going to be easy. This warped concept of tactical 
voting is found in published papers ("peer-reviewed") so there is a 
problem. The fact is that a lot of opinion and shallow thinking has 
been published in peer-reviewed journals, and there are contradictory 
articles and opinions. I've already attracted one likely sock puppet 
who reverted my changes. (My edits in the Instant Runoff Voting 
article flushed out one sock puppet plus one he created just to try 
to take me out; there is a good chance this is another sock for the 
same foot. Certainly it is a single-purpose account, created just to 
edit the Approval Voting article, so far, and registered about when 
the first sock I encountered was about to be banned....