[Election-Methods] USING Condorcet

[Juho]

On Jul 1, 2008, at 16:37 , Kevin Venzke wrote:

> --- En date de : Lun 30.6.08, Brian Olson <bql at bolson.org> a écrit :

>> It's worth rating everyone because if you wind up not
>> getting any of
>> the ones you 'approve of' you can still have some
>> say in which of the
>> rest of them you get.
>
> I don't entirely agree. I would rank below my strategically-determined
> approval cutoff (if I suppose the same election could be held also  
> under
> Approval), but I wouldn't rank that much lower, and I don't think  
> other
> voters should either.
>
> Two reasons for this.
>
> 1. If you rank everybody and are predictably sincere, burial strategy
> by other voters is more likely to succeed against you. People who  
> would
> use this strategy need to have doubt about what you're going to do.
> Truncating at the (strategically determined) approval cutoff is  
> good at
> this: The main effect is that voters don't rank all the frontrunners,
> and burial strategy works basically by assuming one frontrunner will
> get support from another.

Also heavy truncation is dangerous since that could lead even to  
extensive bullet style voting (and all the benefits of Condorcet  
would be lost).

I also think that the probability of successful strategic voting in  
large public elections is very small in Condorcet. Look for example  
at the recent Wikimedia elections. If we assume that the final  
results would be just results of one poll and the actual election  
would be held next week, would there be some good strategies advices  
(other than a sincerity recommendation) available for the voters  
(assuming that the poll information is not accurate, the opinions can  
change before the election, the planned strategies could not be kept  
secret, and full coordination of the voters would not be possible)? I  
think in most such cases Condorcet is safe enough and the threat of  
strategic burial can be pretty much forgotten. As a result full  
rankings should be quite safe.

Juho


> 2. If everyone is persuaded (or forced) to rank all the candidates  
> that
> they can, this would seem to add substance to the criticism that there
> is no guarantee that "everybody's second preference" (etc.) is any  
> good at
> all. Typically my response to this criticism is that if a candidate  
> is so
> bad that his election would be cause to complain about the method,  
> then
> voters shouldn't be voting for this candidate in the first place. That
> response doesn't work if voters will be advised to rank everybody  
> they can.
> (You can still argue that Condorcet gives the reasonable result,  
> but to
> critics it will still seem like a potentially terrible one.)
>
> I should note that these points are only relevant to Condorcet methods
> where truncation is useful in addressing these issues.
>
> Kevin Venzke
>
>
>
>        
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