[EM] Manipulability stats for (some) poll methods

[Michael Ossipoff]

Of course I’m just guessing, but my guess is that “decapitation” is
Closed’s new name for favorite-burial.

Closed sometimes in invents new names without define them.

IRV indeed shares Plurality’s need for favorite-burial defensive-strategy.
I don’t like that, & wouldn’t propose IRV. There are a number of places
where IRV is (the only electoral reform) up for enactment this year, In
spite of that very  unlikeable strategy-need, I wanted to help campaign for
its enactment, in the hope that the voters who’ve enacted it didn’t do so
because they intend to bury their favorite, & so so won’t do so.

But, because IRV is being fraudulently sold to them, with intentional lies,
we can’t count on how people will vote when they find out about what
they’ve enacted…when they find out about the lie.

Therefore, regrettably, we shouldn’t support “RCV”.


On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 11:15 Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> Limelike,
>
> Can you please define and explain the "decapitation" strategy?   I haven't
> heard of it.
>
> And can you elaborate a bit on this? :
>
> IRV is a good example of this. It's *usually* not susceptible to strategy
> (in the IAC model), but I think of it as one of the most strategy-afflicted
> methods on this list. It's vulnerable to some particularly-egregious
> strategies (decapitation), ones that are complex or difficult to explain
> (pushover), and many strategies [that?] don't have a simple defensive
> counterstrategy available (like truncation).
>
>
> Chris B.
>
> On 29/04/2024 2:31 am, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
>
> Hi Kris, thanks for the results! They're definitely interesting.
>
> That said, I'm not sure how useful a metric raw probabilities provide; I
> don't think they provide a very strong measure of how *severely* each
> system is affected by strategy. Missing are:
> 1. How much do voters have to distort their ballots? Is it just
> truncation, compression (as with tied-at-the-top), or full decapitation?
> 2. How hard is it to think of the strategy? Counterintuitive strategies
> (e.g. randomized strategies or pushover) require large, organized parties
> to educate their supporters about how to pull it off. This could be good or
> bad depending on if you like institutionalized parties. Good: sometimes
> people can't pull it off. Bad: this creates an incentive for strong parties
> and partisanship. See the Alaska 2022 Senate race, where Democrats pulled
> off a favorite-betrayal in support of Murkowski to avoid a center-squeeze.
> 3. Is a counterstrategy available?
> 4. How feasible is the strategy (does it involve many or few voters)?
> 5. How bad would the effects of the strategy be? Borda is bad not just
> because it's often susceptible to strategy, but because it gives turkeys a
> solid chance of winning.
>
> IRV is a good example of this. It's *usually* not susceptible to strategy
> (in the IAC model), but I think of it as one of the most strategy-afflicted
> methods on this list. It's vulnerable to some particularly-egregious
> strategies (decapitation), ones that are complex or difficult to explain
> (pushover), and many strategies don't have a simple defensive
> counterstrategy available (like truncation).
>
> A low-probability but occasionally high-impact strategy might be the worst
> of both worlds; voters get lulled into a false sense of security by a few
> elections where strategy doesn't matter, then suddenly find a candidate
> they dislike elected because they failed to execute the appropriate
> defensive strategy.
>
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>
>
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