[EM] Why the concept of "sincere" votes in Range is flawed.

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Dec 2, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> Yes. Preference can be determined, generally, rather easily, by one  
> of two methods. The first method is pairwise comparison. With a  
> series of pairwise comparisons, we can construct a rank order.  
> Usually. It's possible, because different issue spaces get involved  
> in each choice, that this will result in a Condorcet cycle. But that  
> is rare.
>
> The second method, though, bypasses Condorcet cycles, because it is  
> essentially a Range method! That is, we look at the entire set of  
> candidates and pick our favorite, then set this aside, having  
> determined the rank of that candidate. We then look again, etc. We  
> can also run this from the bottom, which of these is worst -- as far  
> as we know (same restriction on the top, by the way, maybe one of  
> those middle candidates is actually quite good, but we just don't  
> know it yet. This is one reason why runoff voting can be much better  
> than fixed-preference voting theory would predict.)

There's a third method, namely the one used for STV/IRV voting: pick  
an overall favorite from the entire field, and then iterate, in each  
iteration excluding already-ranked candidates from consideration.