[EM] Quick and Clean Burial Resistant Smith, study

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi Forest,

Le vendredi 7 janvier 2022, 15:57:27 UTC−6, Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> a écrit : 
> Very true, and I would have said err on the side of VSE until Robert B-J
> convinced me that sincere cycles are practically non-existent with an occurrence
> of less than 0.5 percent.
> 
> He got that statistic from Fair Vote's analysis of over 400 elections, and they
> have no particular reason to exaggerate that statistic. So suppose they're
> right, then do we conclude that any old Condorcet method is as good as another?

I would think that I wouldn't trust a study of IRV elections to talk about voted
CWs across all methods, for the same reason I wouldn't trust a study of FPP
elections to tell me that most elections will have a voted majority favorite
across all methods. The incentives aren't the same.

IRV has no truncation strategy. (In Burlington, we see truncation anyway; how
much more would we see if the method could actually reward truncation?) If there
is usually a *sincere* CW (which I think is likely), then it's easy to imagine
that more complete rankings might lead to finding that CW.

IRV also has among the highest compromise incentive, which I believe translates
directly to nomination disincentive. Meaning, those 400 elections probably
could have had more candidates nominated under a different method. Particularly
if these were not very viable candidates, I think this could definitely lower
the rate of seeing a voted CW.

If we enact a Condorcet method and find that, indeed, there is almost always a
voted Condorcet winner, I would be inclined to wonder if there is something
wrong. Because given a couple of assumptions:

1. Voters feel inclined to truncate the candidates they feel they are trying to
defeat, or that they don't care to worry about for whatever reason.
2. Candidates feel free to enter the race even if they can't win, and their
supporters feel free to vote for them despite this possibility.

Then, this should create an environment where voted cycles are certainly
possible. In particular, cases where a less viable candidate manages to get a
pairwise win over a more viable candidate, due to considerable abstentions of
voters who either were not interested in that contest, or perceived it as unsafe
to support the lesser evil between the two.

Kevin