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

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Juho,

--- En date de : Mer 26.11.08, Juho Laatu <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> a écrit :
> > It is also far from obvious to me that Approval
> > uniquely
> > requires a strategic decision.
> 
> In the EM discussions people seem to assume
> that at least one should put the cutoff between
> some leading candidates. People seldom talk
> about marking those candidates that one approves
> (I have seen this approach however in some
> mechanically generated ballots for simulations).
> Don't know about real life.

Yes. But what I'm trying to do is attack the concept of "sincerity" and
show that "sincere vote" doesn't mean anything without shared
assumptions about how a ballot can represent sincere preferences.

(And then I would want to point out that this question of interpretation
has no effect on the properties of the method.)

> > You can also argue either
> > that FPP also
> > asks for a strategic decision, or else that
> > "approval" is supposed
> > to refer to a real concept.
> 
> FPP (or actually some society that uses FPP) could
> take the stance that voters are expected to pick
> one of the two leading candidates in a two-party
> country, which would make voting sincere.

To say again, the idea of voting being "sincere" only means something if 
the person you're talking to has a shared concept of what this means in 
the context of FPP voting.

> > You can easily deny that you have an internal concept
> of
> > "approval,"
> > but you can also deny that you have an internal
> transitive
> > ranking
> > of the candidates. Maybe it's harder to believe,
> but it
> > can't be 
> > disproven. (Though, I don't really think it is
> harder
> > to believe, 
> > since "approval" has a plain English
> meaning.)
> 
> It seems that voting method "Approval" has cut
> its
> ties to English term "approval" (at least at the
> EM
> list).

That's certainly so, but if I want to define a sincere Approval vote
in terms of the plain English meaning of the term "approval," it will
be hard to show that I'm wrong.

> In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume
> that voters have some easy to identify transitive
> order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere
> opinion).
> 
> I find it revealing that there is not much
> discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive
> votes. Such votes would be strategically more
> efficient than the transitive ones. Use of
> transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the
> sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be
> transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive
> votes would be technically more challenging.)

There is a lot of consensus, and perhaps this makes it easier to assume
that preferences map intuitively to votes as some kind of general
principle. If we debate about Approval we will probably argue about what
the sincere vote is, not whether Approval supports the concept at all.

We would find a similar problem if we granted the idea of sincere
cyclical preferences, and then wanted to analyze rank ballot methods
and what "sincerity" must mean there.

Kevin Venzke