[Election-Methods] USING Condorcet

[rob brown]

Hi Kevin, pardon me for jumping in, I saw something you said that I wanted
to hear some clarification on because i have heard it regularly as a
complaint re: condorcet....

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> --- En date de : Mar 1.7.08, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> a écrit :
> > I also think that the probability of successful strategic
> > voting in
> > large public elections is very small in Condorcet.
>
> It doesn't have to be successful. Backfiring strategy is a problem too. A
> given voter simply being able to imagine how the strategy could work is a
> problem.
>


Maybe I misunderstood your statement, but it seems to say "even if it is an
unwise strategy, the fact that people may do it anyway is a matter of
concern".  Given that:

If a strategy is truly not in the voter's interest, I don't think it makes a
lot of sense to be particularly concerned about what will happen if large
numbers of people try to do it anyway. I would expect such selfish yet
non-rational behavior to mostly cancel out. How is it different from asking
"what if everyone erroneously thinks they can beat the system by voting for
their least favorite candidate?"

My take (and this is based on what I consider to be the theoretical
underpinnings of classical economics and game theory), is that there are two
possibilities to be concerned about:

a)  a prisoner's dilemma situation:  where it is in the individual's
interest to pursue a particular strategy, but everyone is worse off if
everyone does so. Although it hurts everyone, it is not in the least bit
non-rational when looked at from an individual basis, so people can be
expected to do it in large numbers.

b) a situation where people's self interest is in conflict with some other
goal, in particular, their sense of ethics.  This is an especially strong
possibility with voting, since self interest is a rather weak incentive
anyway due to the nearly insignificant possibility of your vote changing the
results (in a large election). As an example, plurality can cause this
conflict because many people think the "honest" thing to do is vote for
their favorite candidate, while it is often strategically unwise to do so if
that candidate is not in the top two most likely to win.

I don't see your scenario -- voting strategically/selfishly but in an unwise
way -- to fit into either a or b, so I see it as issue of minor concern, at
least in the long term.

Maybe you can explain why you think it deserves special consideration
different from other unwise strategies people might "imagine" to work?

-rob
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