On Fri, 23 May 2003, Chris Benham wrote: ...
> On the subject of plain Approval elections being manipulated by "fake > information", I think that there is a danger that a majority's sole > sincere favourite could lose because some of his/her supporters were > conned/frightened by bogus polls published by a partisan media. These > polls could falsely promote the possibilty that the MF could lose to a > horror/completely unacceptable candidate > (when in fact the real situation is that this is not a real possibilty > and that the 2 front-runners are the MF and some other less horrible > candidate), and thus frighten some of MFs sincere first-preference > supporters into "approving" Less Horrible with the result that Less > Horrible wins with a "bigger majority". Here's an example of a slightly different scenario, from yahoo EM archives message #10396, of manipulation by fake polls, the most perfidious kind of election manipulation short of vote buying, ballot stuffing, civil rights violations, etc. True preferences of voters: 6000 A>>B>C 3000 C>B>>A 1000 B>C>>A Poll results reported by the corporate media backing the corporate clones B and C: 35% A>B>C 40% C>B>A 25% B>C>A Under Approval candidate A could easily lose to B if enough A supporters are fooled by the fake poll. See the full text of message 10396 for further analysis showing that Borda and IRV are also apt to give B the win in this context, while Condorcet and Candidate Proxy are almost sure to elicit more sincere votes and give the win to A. Forest ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
