[EM] Re : Strategic Voting and SImulating it.

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Greg,

--- En date de : Dim 12.10.08, Greg Nisbet <gregory.nisbet at gmail.com> a écrit :
> De: Greg Nisbet <gregory.nisbet at gmail.com>
> Objet: [EM] Strategic Voting and SImulating it.
> À: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> Date: Dimanche 12 Octobre 2008, 14h39
> Thoughts on Strategy:
> 
> Voting strategy is susceptible to the Tinkerbell effect.
> Certain conditions
> only exist because voters or their programmers
> "believe" them to.
> 
> Coming up with voter strategy piecemeal is not methodical
> enough. I propose
> a fairly reasonable alternative to this. I call it Vote By
> Result.
> 
> I have a general purpose strategy idea.
> 
> Divide the voters into particular groups that vote early to
> late.

I am confused about why you select this? In real life, votes are 
simultaneous.

> The earliest group would presumably vote honest (I
> recommend making it small
> to minimize the impact of "false honesty")
> 
> The others would abandon their true favorite if they lacked
> the power to
> independently make it reality.

This is sounding too dependent on a certain method. Abandoning your
sincere favorite is only useful in some methods.

> Essentially after each group goes the results-so-far are
> updated.
> 
> Then each pseudovoter* in the new group votes.
> 
> The process continues
> 
> *  a pseudovoter is like a block of voters, but its vote is
> given more
> weight  than an individual voter and agrees with itself
> completely so that
> voters in later generations can counteract the
> "momentum" of previous
> results. The result of this experiment would be fairly
> simple. The voters
> would end up using simple strategy. Later pseudovoters
> would abandon their
> true favorite if they do not possess the power to
> independently alter
> results and instead to default to the best electable
> alternative.

It concerns me that the subsequent voters sound so ready to vote for
whoever is a current frontrunner, when that frontrunner status might be
based on nothing but luck, from getting votes early.

Kevin Venzke