[EM] Quick and Clean Burial Resistant Smith, compromise

[Daniel Carrera]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 6:00 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> So the A-first voters have no incentive to
> bury under the dark horse. Thus the ball doesn't get rolling and there's
> no escalation into a chicken problem.
>
> Warren then says "perhaps that won't save you because people will bury
> blindly anyway". Which is something I don't agree with. Sometimes I get
> the impression he draws too much experience from Borda, which *is* awful.
>

I get that Warren's scenario is a possibility, and I don't want to dismiss
it, but the evidence he cites doesn't seem persuasive:

1) `Australian ranked-ballot voters use this sort of "maximal exaggeration"
strategy`.
2) `90% of Nader-favorite voters voted, strategically, for somebody else in
USA 2000`

But those are opposing strategies (compromise toward the center vs
exaggeration). To me it seems that in Australia they exaggerate because
they use IRV and they know they can, but in the US they compromise, because
they use FPTP and they know they must.

As you noted in another email, Range expects voters to strategize to cover
its shortcomings. Last night I was scribbling DH3 scenarios and when I
tried one with Range I got the DH elected. I had to then go back and change
the votes to get Range to avoid the DH. That doesn't inspire confidence. At
the end of the day, if everyone tells the election system that the
extremist party is their #2 option because everyone assumes that nobody
else would be crazy enough to vote for those nutjobs ... well, what can you
do? I'd rather have a system that encourages honest voting than one that
encourages strategy but assumes that voters will never get the strategy
wrong.

I have other, more fundamental issues with Range. To me the premise seems
flawed. Yes, I get that technically the ballot has more information. But I
feel that its advocates skip a step when they assume that they know how to
convert those ballots into a winner. I don't believe that I or anyone can
convert their political views into a number. I don't believe that we'll
produce numbers the same way. I don't believe that adding those numbers is
the right thing to do with them. And I don't buy the argument that another
man's vote is worth more than mine because he feels more strongly about his.

Still better than IRV though.

Cheers,
-- 
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
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