[EM] “goal of a better election method”

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 02/12/2017 12:48 PM, steve bosworth wrote:
> Re: “goal of a better election method”
> 
> To all (but prompted by Sennet Williams and Rober Bristow-Johnson, and
> earlier by Michael Ossipoff, Richard Fobes, Kristofer Munsterhjelm, 
> Steve Eppley,Jameson Quinn, and Kevin Venzke)

[...]

I forgot to mention this strategy-in-grading problem.

Suppose we're using ordinary MJ, and candidate X's final grade is Good.
Someone who gave X a grade of "Very Good" has no reason to exaggerate to
"Excellent" because his vote is counted equally according to MJ's tie
breaker. This helps prevent the method from becoming Really Expensive
Approval where everybody just votes max or min.

However, if you use averages as a tiebreak, the voter might think: "I'm
reasonably sure X's final grade is going to be Good, but as there may be
other candidates with Good as a final grade as well, I should do my best
to make sure X's average gets as high as possible, which means that I
should vote Excellent instead of Very Good". If enough voters do that,
then the method slides into Approval.

And since we need all the help we can get to keep MJ from becoming
Approval (some Range advocates say that MJ would essentially become
Approval even in its current state), it's best to make this kind of
strategy ineffective. And B&L say that requirement narrows down the only
tiebreakers you can use into order functions -- for the same reason that
only an order function will do for the main scoring prior to any tiebreaker.