I do not suggest that anyone has lied, but I do wonder whether these people who have told Mike that they frequently have an incentive to betray their favourite under IRV really understand what they said, or if they even understood the tally method of IRV. I have queried a lot of Australians on how they understand IRV and found that about half do not. Many understand only that they use a rank ballot and that the winners are known about two hours after the close of polls. A surprisingly large minority believe that the winners are determined by a plurality count based on their first preference, and they don't see the purpose of later preferences. This would account for some of the information given to Mike - they were acting as if the method was plurality. (Aside: I am yet to meet another Australia face to face, other than an electoral worker, who can explain the principles of STV tallying.)
So, I am voicing my opinion that claims of widespread strategic voting in Australia should be subjected to some doubt. The pertinent question is whether people here have wildly exaggerated the importance of strategic voting, and whether simple minmax methods, such as PC or MMPO are good enough. My impression is that the rampant strategic voting that occurs in the US is caused by the use of plurality. I have lived in America, and discussed politics and voting with Americans, and it was obvious that the need to betray a favourite to vote for the lesser of two evils is apparent to most Americans. I suspect that if Americans were given any rank ballot to vote on, then the practice of strategic voting would decline significantly, over time. I believe that the difficulty in organising the public at large into voting insincere preferences so as to generate an insincere cycle is too great to be realistic. One problem is that the presumption is that they themselves do not represent majority and that a majority prefers another candidate to their candidate. To justify more sophisticated methods, you then have to consider the improbability of organised strategic voting in a case where there are more than three contenders. [with PC giving the same results as Ranked Pairs, beatpath, etc when there are less than four contenders] How many public elections do you think there will be where there are four or more serious contenders. In Australia, under IRV, where there is no penalty in the tally method against running multiple similar candidates, three serious-contender-elections are rare and I have never heard of anything beyond that. So, even if you think strategic voting is a real danger, I still say that PC is good enough because having four or more serious contenders in a public election is unrealistic. The real advantage of PC is not that its better than another method, but that it has a realistic chance of being sold and properly adopted. It needs to be sold to the public, but more than that, it needs to be understood by the politicians. How many politicians have been made to appreciate the subtle advantages of any of the more sophisticated methods? I suspect none, and a real danger here lies in the fact that whatever the electoral method, it is going written up and legislated by politicians. It is not in the nature of legislators to refer to external definitions, such as your own. They are going to reword your definitions, as they understand them. They might also stick a preamble on the bill that contradicts the details of the bill. Then, the first time there is an interesting election, the whole thing then goes to the courts who make their decision based upon the intention of the legislature that didn't even understand the method. At least with a minmax method such as PC the rule is simple. The winner is the candidate who suffers the weakest defeat. This would even be straightforward to defend in court: Suppose candidate A won but suffered a defeat by candidate B. Candidate B goes to the courts to argue that as B beat A, a win by A contravenes the intention of the bill, and is contrary to the meaning of democracy itself.... If the method was minmax, candidate A can argue that the argument made by B against A is weaker than the identical argument that would be made by some other candidate C against B, that if a win by A is an injustice, then a win by B is a worse injustice. I think this is a simple and coherent enough argument to be understood by a politician (for the law to be written) or judge (for the law to be interpreted). If the method were any condorcet method other than minmax, then the arguments would be more complex, and I would predict that the arguments would become convoluted and that the judges would be unable to reconcile reality with whatever the legislators wrote. I think that the principle of condorcet, of a full pairwise analysis, is simple enough for most people to appreciate, and that abandoning the pairwise principle of analysis in order to perform the rare completion is not simple enough for most people. I don't think that complicated strategising in extremely rare more-than-three-contender-elections is enough of a concern to warrant introducing a method that most people won't understand. Anthony ps. What are the differences in strategic implications between PC and MMPO? I recall that in going from PC to MMPO you loose several things to gain later-no-harm. I think later-no-harm is very desirable because it means that the voters can be truthfully encouraged to rank as many candidates as they like. Without later-no-harm, I think bullet voting would be a problem. So, what are the PC benefits that are lost, and how desirable are they? --- MIKE OSSIPOFF <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Anthony-- > > I'm glad to get the opinions of people in Australia, about IRV > strategy in > Australia. > > I've heard from about 5 Australians about that. Three told me that > favorite-burial is common in Australian IRV elections. Two > (including you) > told me that they haven't heard of it. > > One could argue that the three who told me it's common were lying. > But why > would they lie? > > Isn't it more plausible that the two who haven't heard of it just > happen to > have not talked to the people who vote that way (and admit it)? > > One of them even told me that she herself had voted a lesser-evil > compromise > in 1st place, over her favorite, in the most recent election. Was > she lying? > Why would she lie about that? > > One of them told me that it's difficult for the smaller parties to > get their > members to rank them in 1st place, because they all want to rank a > big-2 > lesser-evil in 1st place instead. He said that voters say that > they're > doing that to avoid wasting their vote. > > One Australian told me that they don't vote that way because they > know about > IRV's specific faults. They do it because they assume that the > situation is > as it is in Plurality (First Past The Post). And of course, to a > significant > extent they're right, with IRV. He didn't say they don't vote that > way. He > said they do it because they assume the situation is as sit is in > Plurality. > > People have complained that the 5 Australians I've talked to don't > constitute a scientific statistical study. I have nothing against a > > scientific statistical study. But, in the meantime, I merely tell > the > information that's available so far. > > Mike Ossipoff > > _________________________________________________________________ > On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on > how to > get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement > > ---- > Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for > list info > Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info