[EM] Voter strategising ability

Juho Laatu juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Jul 25 23:33:29 PDT 2014


On 24 Jul 2014, at 07:11, robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:

> 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.

Yes. For example Burlngton votes could be used as an example for Condorcet related considerations. I was looking for strategic advice on how Condorcet voters would vote. Let's say that the Burlington results are a poll one week before the actual election day. Based on this single poll it seems that there may well be a Condorcet winner also in the actual election. The question is, how should Burlington people vote strategically if the actual election will be based on some Condorcet method? (pick any of the regular ones) We need a piece of text that ordinary voters can understand and implement. It could be a generic rule, or a direct recommendation to some named group of voters to vote in a certain way in this particular election.

We must take into account that not all Burlington voters are willing to attempt strategic plotting, and many of them will not notice our recommendations in the first place. There may be also multiple conflicting or competing strategic advices. And other polls that give somewhat different results. And there will be hopeful candidates, parties and voters that hope that their favourite candidates can gather still more support during the last week before the election (i.e. their strategy may be that they claim and believe that they will win anyway, or get more support in the election than they actually will ever get).

So, do we have some good strategic advices for the Burlington people? I'm not aware of any so far (except the regular, "you can probably get best results by voting sincerely"), but I have not studied the Burlington votes carefully from this point of view. Can someone provide some "more strategic" guidance (hopefully working strategies) to the voters? If not, maybe we can assume that at least in Burlington Condorcet would have been a pretty strategy safe method.

If there are no such good implementable strategies, how much different should the Burlington "poll" results be that there would be a (possibly) working strategy available? Or should we maybe conclude that Burlington is "safe" by a considerable margin?

Juho


> 
> 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."
> 
> 
> 
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