[EM] Quick and Clean Burial Resistant Smith, compromise

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 01/17/2022 4:31 AM Daniel Carrera <dcarrera at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 2:48 AM Colin Champion <colin.champion at routemaster.app> wrote:
> > A bit of a side question, but is strategy resistance a good metric to quote?
> >  FIrstly, you'd never rank methods on it - you'd end up choosing a 
> >  coin toss.
...
> 
> > Thirdly, consider a 3-candidate election using IRV. The central 
> >  candidate is the Condorcet winner, but supporters of one of the 
> >  non-central candidates realise that the opposed non-central candidate is 
> >  likely to win owing to the operation of a centre squeeze, and therefore 
> >  compromise on the central candidate. This satifies JGA's definition of 
> >  strategic manipulation but is certainly not an additional fault in IRV; 
> >  on the contrary, it's a mitigation of its weakness under sincere voting.
> 
> That does sound like a fault in IRV. If the goal is to get the Condorcet winner (and I agree!) why not use a Condorcet method? 

Woot!  I've been asking that question for better than a decade.

It continues to be a curiosity that Center for Election Science likes to point to Burlington 2009 as an example of "broken RCV", but then they toss the baby out with the bathwater and impugn the ranked ballot when it's precisely *because* we have those ranked ballots that we know that the RCV election in Burlington failed in 2009.

If Approval Voting fails to elect the Condorcet winner, we would never know it (for sure).  We might suspect it, but we would lack the ballot data to know for sure.

This is why I am simply a Condorcet guy.

> The example you cite is one of my biggest complaints with IRV. If people are driven to vote dishonestly to compensate for a failure of the system, that tells me that the method is flawed.

It really is the seminal flaw.  It is why, when IRV does not elect the CW, that IRV fails to deliver on literally **all** of its promises: guarantee electing the majority candidate when there are more than two candidates, eliminate the spoiler effect, remove the burden of tactical vote so that voters feel free to "vote their hopes not their fears" so that third-party and independent candidates have a level playing field with the two-party duopoly.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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