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

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Nov 26, 2008, at 1:50 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:

> --- On Wed, 26/11/08, Jonathan Lundell <jlundell at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> There's nothing
>> *wrong* with voting insincerely (or, equivalently,
>> strategically), in this sense; a voter has a right to do
>> their best to achieve an optimum result in a particular
>> context.----
>
> I think it would be better not to classify "voting insincerely" and  
> "voting strategically" as equivalent.
>
> For example in Approval some voter may estimate the popularity of  
> all the candidates and the expected behaviour of other voters and  
> his own preferences and interests, and then decides to fill the  
> ballot in a certain way in order to maximize the probability of  
> reaching good results in the election. In this case it may be best  
> to say that the voter identified the best tactic to vote and  
> therefore voted strategically. But doing so was not insincere since  
> that was what all the voters were expected to do.

I agree; it's a useful distinction.

> Some methods thus make the assumption that voters will find their  
> best strategy and then apply it while other methods may assume that  
> voters will simply mark their sincere preferences on the ballot  
> (i.e. without considering how the votes are counted and how they  
> could influence the outcome by casting some specific kind of vote).
>
> (There is a difference between ballots that include falsified  
> opinions an ballots where the voter has just chosen one of the  
> available different alternatives that are all equally sincere. In  
> Approval one could say that any position of the approval cutoff is  
> equally sincere as long as it separates a set of better candidates  
> from a set of worse candidates (or alternatively one could require  
> the cutoff to be in such place where there is a large gap between  
> the utilities of the approved and non-approved candidates). In rated  
> and ranked methods the sincere vote may be unique, and any deviation  
> from that may be considered a falsified vote / insincere voting.)
>
> I think it depends on the society and its rules (and the method and  
> election in question) if insincere voting is considered to be  
> "wrong" or not. In many cases the society will benefit if insincere  
> voting is generally not accepted. (Strategic voting can be accepted  
> in elections where strategic voting is the "agreed" way to vote.)

It's a reason that "(in)sincere" isn't very good terminology for  
everyday use; likewise "manipulation". They're fine terms when well- 
defined and used in the context of social choice theory, but they  
carry a lot of baggage. A voter is, in my view, completely justified  
in ignoring the name of the election method ("approval", for instance)  
and the instructions (vote in order of preference) and casting their  
vote strictly on the basis of how the ballot will be counted.

(Which is why I'm partial to ordinal systems; it seems to me that I as  
a voter can pretty easily order candidates without considering  
strategy, whereas the decision of where to draw the line for Approval,  
or how to assign cardinal values to candidates, explicitly brings  
strategy into the picture.)