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

[Juho Laatu]

Yes, one could use also some more neutral terms than
"(in)sincere" and "manipulation" (or "falsify").
Terms like "personal opinion based" or "personal
utility based" would be quite neutral (but longer).

If one wants to replace also "strategic" one could
try something like "optimized" or "tactically best".

(I'm sure there are better ones too.)

Juho


--- On Thu, 27/11/08, Jonathan Lundell <jlundell at pobox.com> wrote:

> From: Jonathan Lundell <jlundell at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] Why the concept of "sincere" votes in Range is flawed.
> To: juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk
> Cc: election-methods at electorama.com
> Date: Thursday, 27 November, 2008, 1:17 AM
> 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.)