[EM] Voter strategising ability

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 7/23/14 2:17 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
> On 20 Jul 2014, at 22:48, Kristofer Munsterhjelm<km_elmet at t-online.de>  wrote:
>
>> Discussion about which kind of strategy is most likely to happen can go on forever without data. Even if there is data, it is quite easy and/or tempting to explain it away as not being representative of what would happen under an ordinary election. As long as that's possible, it's really hard to convince someone who is worried about burial not to be, or vice versa.
> Unfortunately we don't have data from very many Condorcet elections.

but the *data* doesn't give a rat's ass *how* it's counted or 
tabulated.  can't we use the data from all ranked-choice elections 
(which, in government, would be IRV or RCV or AV or STV or Hare) and see 
how they would work out with Condorcet-compliant rules?  like we did for 
Burlington 2009.  that was a 4-way election close enough that the 
Plurality (of 1st choice votes) winner, the IRV winner, and the 
Condorcet winner were three different candidates.  and yet there was 
*no* cycle.  not even close to a cycle.

are there any other ranked-choice elections where media or research 
could access the anonymous ballot data and see if there would have been 
a cycle and then see how Shulze and Tideman and Minimax and Kemeny would 
have been different?  i think we would virtually never see a cycle.  and 
*more* than virtually, i think we would *never* see a cycle with more 
than 3 in the Smith set.

>   And those elections have been quite non-competitive. So we don't know very well what would happen (in different societies) in competitive Condorcet elections.

but with ballot data in public records (and a little bit of computer 
programming), we *should* be able to use all that IRV ballot data and 
see what might happen in hypothetical Condorcet-compliant elections.

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."