[EM] Helping a candidate in the case of ties

[Dave Ketchum]

Of course, you have to read the voter's mind to know if the change  
might have been seen as desirable.

I was into tactics.

One thought I had was a base from which to think of more-or-less  
controllable changes:  Start with equal size parties and all members  
doing bullet voting - result is a tie with all candidates getting  
equal votes for and against.

Dave Ketchum

On Nov 25, 2009, at 2:11 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> Dave Ketchum wrote:
>> This is more detailed work, depending on precise knowledge.
>> Also gets tricky since many changes affect more than one pair of  
>> candidates.
>> For a simple example where helping A in A vs B, without disturbing  
>> their relationship to other candidates, will help C (could be  
>> hoping to cause A to be bigger than B in their pair; could be  
>> simply to change the magnitude of their difference).
>>     Tell those who would do A=B or B>A, to vote A>B.  This will  
>> affect A vs B without affecting any other pair of candidates.
>> Note that adding one or both of these, or giving them adjacent  
>> ranks when they had not had this, requires more complex analysis.
>
> This was intended to be in the context of, for instance, later-no- 
> help or mono-raise. These relative criteria are defined as "x should  
> not be helped/harmed when...". Therefore I don't have the privilege  
> of telling voters to, for instance, vote A>B instead of A=B - the  
> simulator just, (in the case of mono-raise) raises a random  
> candidate and checks if that harms him, or lowers a random candidate  
> and checks if that helps him.
>
> The hard part is to define "help" and "harm" when either or both of  
> the outcomes have ties in the social ordering.