Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 20:30:19 -0800 From: Brian Olson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [EM] Is range voting the panacea we need?
Straight rating summation is vulnerable to strategic voting. Perhaps in this study people voted honestly because it obviously didn't matter and so there was no incentive to vote strategically. In a real election the stakes would be higher.
My favorite solution is to run Instant Runoff style disqualification cycles over Normalized Ratings (IRNR). I believe this method is strategy proof and passes a handful of other desirable election method criterion.
In general, methods that proceed by sequential elimination are not strategy proof:
Suppose that there are only three candidates, and you think that your compromise C has a significantly better chance than your favorite F of winning against the candidate D that you dislike the most, and that there is a good chance that D will be one of the finalists. Suppose further, that F and C both have decent chances of getting into the final round.
In this situation, you have an incentive to "bury" your favorite F, i.e. to try and make F lose in the first round.
This may not be too common, but it is a barrier that every third party has to surmount if they are to graduate from non-entity to serious contender status.
Labor may be short compared to nine months of gestation, but birth cannot happen without it. A random sample of the nine months might give the impression that labor is too rare to worry about.
Similarly, before a third party can win an election it has to reach the stage at which this burying strategy becomes a problem, if the election method proceeds by sequential elimination.
For this reason Kevin came up with the "Runoff Without Elimination" idea, culminating in his "Gradual Approval," which I believe to be a superior use of Cardinal Ratings style ballots.
It doesn't suffer from the burying strategy because all candidates are still in the race in the last round.
A candidate with lots of success in previous rounds just gets the approval cutoff moved closer to her as a "reward," so losers of previous rounds (whether favorite or compromise or both) still have chances in the final round.
Forest ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
