[EM] Some thoughts on Condorcet and Burial

[C.Benham]

The way a lot of Condorcet enthusiasts see things is that voters 
naturally have a sincere full ranking of the candidates
(or certainly those with any hope of making it in to the Smith set), 
that we should assume that all those implied pairwise
preferences are equally strong, or if not they are all nonetheless 
equally important.


And that "normally" if all the voters give these rankings there will be 
a "sincere CW", but if the used method (that meets
the Condorcet criterion) fails to elect this candidate due to some of 
voters declining to give their full strict rankings creating a
top cycle which the method resolves by electing someone else then there 
is some huge problem.


I reject all that.  I think a better way too start looking at things is 
to assume that we have three factions of voters (each with
its own candidate) that strongly prefer their favourites to the other 
two candidates who they consider to be about equally
bad (and/or uninteresting) and so they are not inclined to do anything 
except bullet vote (Later-no-Harm or not).


That has two big advantages. One, that probably it is more realistic. We 
are looking to replace FPP and most voters would
probably be happy to continue voting for just one candidate.


And two, with this model there can be no controversy as to who should 
win. Every method has no choice other than to
elect the candidate with the most votes.

I think one mistake that Blake Cretney made quite a while ago (stemming 
from the mind-set I described at the beginning)
was to classify truncation as a variety of Burial strategy.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090613041320/http://condorcet.org/emr/defn.shtml

> *Definitions*
>
> *bullet voting*
> Reducing the number of alternatives you express a preference for, or 
> give some rating to.  This is a type ofburying 
> <https://web.archive.org/web/20090613041320/http://condorcet.org/emr/defn.shtml#burying>strategy.
>
> *burying*
> Insincerely ranking an alternative lower in the hope of defeating it.
> *
> truncate*
> To insincerely leave unranked alternatives who will therefore be 
> counted as equal and lower than all ranked alternatives.  This is one 
> type of burying strategy.
>
>
I think "burying" strategy should only refer to insincere order-reversal 
down-ranking a candidate in the hope of making it lose to a candidate
the voter prefers.

(BTW, it looks to me that the definition given of "bullet voting" is 
missing after "Reducing" the phrase "to one". Otherwise it seems to be
the same ting as truncation.)

The voting method should be very happy to assume that presumed (or 
imaginary) strict "preferences" that the voter chooses not to
express on the ballot for whatever reason (barring some over-strong 
truncation or compromise incentives) simply don't exist.

On the other hand egregious failures of  Later-no-Help should be looked 
on as being "suspiciously convenient".

I think it could be useful to have a version of Later-no-Help that has 
been weakened enough for it to be compatible with Condorcet.

More later.

Chris Benham





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