[EM] Voting-System Choice for Polls (Just one more thing I want to say)

Michael Ossipoff email9648742 at gmail.com
Sat Dec 17 22:05:35 PST 2016


Before quitting EM & retiring from voting-systems, there's one more thing
I'd like to say:

What's the best voting-system for polls?

Though FBC is important for official political elections, I don't think it
serves a purpose in polls, where the purpose is to get sincere rankings,
and hope that people vote sincere rankings. In polls, the compulsion to
favorite-bury is much less likely.

As I've said, I haven't noticed any sign (top-cycles for 1st place) of
strategy in polls.

I suggest that, for sincere electorates, MAM is the ideal best. That means
it's best for polls at the Condorcet Internet Voting Service, where there's
been no sign of strategy.

But what if you're doing a poll among people who are highly involved in the
subject that you're polling about, and have strong committment to some
alternatives? Like, for example, suppose you're pollng at EM about
voting-systems?

Maybe some members of the electorate will resort to strategy. Especially if
the electorate are a voting-system mailing-lislt.

So you can't really be sure that there'll be no chicken-dilemma defection.

So maybe, instead of MAM, Smith//MMPO should be used.

It is automatically resistant to chicken-dilemma defection.

But, for burial, it isn't as good as MAM. With MAM, a candidate that you, &
sufficiently-many others, don't rank can't beat the CWs by burial.

...but it can in MMPO, though there's a lot of uncertainty & risk in trying
burial in MMPO.

Maybe Smith//MMPO's reliable automatic chicken-dilemma protection is more
important, because defection is easier & less drastic a strategy than
burial.

But maybe MAM's better burial protection is more important, because burial
temptation & opportunity is a lot more common than a chicken-dilemma
situation.

My suggestion: Use both.

Do the count by Smith//MMPO, & by MAM. Of the winners by those 2 methods,
the final winner is the one that pairwise-beats the other.

That's a solid good solution, because:

In the chicken-dilemma example, and also in a burial example, the intended
victim of the offensive strategy pairbeats the perps' candidate.

So, declaring, as winner, the one of those 2 winners that pairbeats the
other is definitely the best solution, if MAM & Smith//MMPO are the best
choices, each of which offers better protection in different ways.

Of course, it's been pointed out that methods that elect the pair-winner,
among the winners by 2 different methods, tend to fail FBC.

But FBC isn't needed in polls, where you want sincere ranking, not
equal-top-ranking.

Michael Ossipoff
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