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Another comment on the turkey-raising criticism of conditionality-by-mutuality:<br><br>Sure, if several rival candidates' supporters all give a conditional vote to the same loser, in order to get a mutual vote thereby, then that loser will<br>get more votes in those transactions than any one of the rivals, and could thereby win.<br><br>1. This requires that only one loser is getting those conditional turkey-raising votes. Or at least that their number is significantly less than that of the<br>rivals. In reality, if you're going to insincerely vote one loser over your rivals for that reason, you'd also vote the whole set of losers similarly.<br><br>2. This consequence of turkey-raising could also be referred to as backfiring burial. You know that when burial backfires in Beatpath, that's considered<br>a virtue, a deterrent. Then it's a virtue and a deterrent in the mutually-conditional methods too. Voters attempting burial strategy are asking for it. Don't<br>expect the method to protect voters practicing burial.<br><br>Voting options:<br><br>I recently said that MTAOC, MCAOC and AOCBucklin don't really make sense as options in an Approval election (though certainly AOC does). I said<br>that because Approval's count rule says nothing about majority. I felt that Middle-When-Needed and Stepwise-When-Needed would be more in the<br>option-using-voter's interest, and for that reason MTAOC, etc., as options didn't make sense. But that was before I found out that Middle-When-Needed<br>and Stepwise-When-Needed almost surely violate FBC.<br><br>It seems to me that it's certain that the voting options of MTAOC, MCAOC and AOCBucklin wouldn't violate FBC. That's because, for instance, an Approval election<br>with some ballots using the AOCBucklin voting option is just like an ordinary AOCBucklin count, but with some voters voting only at 1st rank. (those are the voters<br>who are just voting an Approval ballot instead of using the AOCBucklin voting option).<br><br>An MCA ballot is just an ABucklin ballot that only uses the 1st two rank positions. So it's clear that MCA voting and ABucklin voting are entirely <br>compatible as options in the same Approval election. <br><br>The difference between the MCA option and the MTA option is just that, if there are two or more candidates with a majority (MTA and MCA ballots haven't yet given<br>votes to their middle-rated candidates), the MTA ballots will give a vote to their middle-rated majority candidates, and the MCA ballots won't. Of course there's no<br>reason why some voters couldn't opt to manage their votes in the MTA way, while others opt to manage their votes in the MCA way.<br><br>And, if the MCA vote-management option doesn't cause an FBC failure, and the MTA vote-management option doesn't cause an FBC failure, then it seems to me<br>that there's no reason to expect an FBC violation when both options are available.<br><br>I can't say that the above statements are _certain_. But they seem convincingly supported.<br><br>A more uncertain question is: As a vote management option in an Approval election, is there a different option, other than the MTAOC, MCAOC and <br>AOCBucklin options, that is more in the option-user's interest--without causing an FBC violation?<br><br>I don't like to leave uncertainties or open questions when I leave this mailing list, but those uncertainties will remain when I (soon) quit the list, unless someone else<br>has answered them by that time.<br><br>MJ majority protections:<br><br>Yes, a majority who rate x,y and z over a, b and c still does so even if it rates x, y and z differently, as is the case in ABucklin.<br><br>But the fact remains that if you rate them all fairly closely, then there's a good chance that you're rating them all over where their<br>medians would otherwise be, and, therefore, are not raising x,y and z's medians any more than you're raising a, b and c's medians.<br><br>So sure, it's like Bucklin in one respect, but there's a (sometimes good) chance that you aren't helping one candidate over the other at all.<br><br>MJ is like Approval in which you have the option of only uncertainly (maybe and maybe not) raising a candidate's final count score<br>against that of another candidate. ...and/or of only uncertainly raising a candidate's final count score at all, instead of lowering it.<br><br>In RV, too, if you rate a candidate below hir mean rating, you lower hir mean rating. And, additionally, the less extreme your rating,<br>the less effect it has.<br><br>But, as I said, I'd be glad for the enaction of MJ or RV, (instead of Plurality, IRV, or any FBC-failing method) because they both essentially<br>are Approval with the above options. You don't have to use those options.<br><br>And they both meet FBC. RV also has Forest's solution to the ABE problem. Approval has it too, implemented probabilistically.<br><br>So I stand by my ranking of:<br><br>1. Approval<br>2. RV<br>3. MJ<br><br>--among the methods in Ruderman's poll.<br><br>A more complete merit ranking:<br><br>1. MMPO2<br>2. MDDTR<br>3. optionally-conditional methods<br>4. automatically-conditional methods<br>5. ICT<br><br>(Approval and Bucklin versions below are ordinary, don't have conditionality)<br><br>6. ABucklin<br>7. Approval, MTA and MCA<br>8. RV<br>9. MJ<br><br>Among the optionally or automatically conditional<br>methods, I'd rank their Approval, MTA, MCA and ABucklin<br>versions in the same order as ordinary Approval, MTA, MCA and<br>ABucklin are ranked.<br><br>For public proposals, though, I'd say that ordinary Approval is at the top, with AOC next.<br><br>Though AOC is better, brings big improvement to Approval, it's also true that ordinary Approval already<br>had at least 3 other ways to deal with co-operation/defection:<br><br>1. Public declaration of principled refusal to accept a compromise or co-operate with a faction (Maybe under<br>specified conditions)<br><br>2. The consequences, in subsequent elections, of defection<br><br>3. Forest's solution (probabilistically-implemented in Approval)<br><br>Regarding #2, a good strategy for a defected-against faction would be to refuse to help the defectors<br>in the next election. Then give them another chance to co-operate in the election after that. Factions should make<br>it clear that that will be their strategy.<br><br>In the co-operation/defection tournament for computer programs, described in Scientific American some time ago,<br>the winner was a program called "Tit-For-Tat". I believe that the strategy that I described in the above paragraph<br>is the Tit-For-Tat strategy: Vote the same strategy that the other faction did in the previous election.<br><br>But SciAm later described another strategy that worked even better than Tit-For-Tat. I don't remember what it was,<br>but it was nearly as simple as Tit-For-Tat.<br><br>The point is that there are good deterrent strategies for co-operation/defection.<br><br>The broader point is that, even without AOC's conditionality, ordinary Approval can deal very well with the<br>co-operation/defection problem. So ordinary Approval has merit, as will as winnability, as a first proposal.<br><br>Mike Ossipoff<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> </div></body>
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