Recently I've come to question the accepted wisdom that strategic voting is a bad thing that should be minimized.
Obviously certain election methods have undesirable consequences when voters cast ballots strategically rather than sincerely -- but should the blame really be placed on the strategic voting, or on the method itself for constraining the choice of effective strategies available to the voters? Are there cases where the winner according to strategically cast ballots is a better choice than the winner according to sincere ballots? IRV instantly comes to mind, since it seems to suffer from a multitude of problems even when voters cast their ballots sincerely (so much so, that I'm led to wonder if widespread strategic voting might actually *improve* the results in some instances.) What about other systems? What work has been done in this area, which might serve as a starting point for further research? -Bill Clark -- Ralph Nader for US President in 2004 http://votenader.org/ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
