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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

> Ahem. Range and Approval reward sincere voting, if sincere is 
> understood. The "insincere voting" that they allegedly reward is based 
> on assumptions of what the votes mean that are inaccurate and 
> essentially baseless. Certainly a vote under Approval doesn't mean that 
> the voter "approves" of the candiate, in the ordinary sense. It's an 
> unfortunate name for the method, for this reason. Count All the Votes is 
> what I like to call it. Open Voting might be a nice name, what do you 
> think?
> 
> Open Voting.
> 
> Yes, I like it.

Range and Approval might not be insincere (if we accept your 
definition), but they still require voters to use strategy - that is, to 
keep the votes of others in mind when they're voting. In Approval in 
particular, this is very important (consider the Bush-Gore-Nader 
situation - do you vote for Nader, or {Nader, Bush}?). Therefore the 
method will work to the degree that the voters know this information 
(from polls, etc).

If that's true, why not just lighten the load on the voters? Why should 
the voters have to know whether polls are accurate, who's in the lead, 
and so on? Use a computer to strategize instead. DSV.

Now, DSV might have strategies, and these strategies may include order 
reversal; but first, those strategies will be hard to employ (like in 
other good ranked voting systems), and second, they're really just 
reflections of what instability may exist in the underlying voting 
system plus strategy (e.g, if you're voting strategically in 
Approval-DSV, you're emulating lying on the polls others use to inform 
their Approval decision, for instance).