On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 8:21 AM, Juho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Woodall free riding uses some irrelevant candidate that is ranked first. > > Hylland free riding does not rank the favourite candidate. > > A third approach to free riding is to rearrange the candidates to reflect > the estimated probabilities. > > The true preference order of a voter is A>B>C>D>E>... The voter expects A to > be elected quite certainly. Candidates B and C are less certain. The voter > considers B and C to be almost as good as A. Candidates starting from D are > considerably worse. As a result the voter decides to vote B>C>A>D>E>...
I think this is the strategy that most parties actually use for vote management. They never recommend to the voters not to rank a certain party member. They just tell them to rank a certain candidate first. This means that the high probability candidate ends up getting less first choice votes. In fact, it is often not even recommendations. Each candidate is often given a specific area of the constituency where he can canvas in. This pushes up his first choice total. > It is possible that B or C gets elected while A will not, > but the risks are not too big. Yeah, that has happened in Ireland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_O'Rourke She was a cabinet minister, but they over-estimated her popularity. > In any case the three clearly best candidates > (A, B, C) will get all possible power of this vote. Not necessarily. If the popular candidate doesn't get elected, then some of his personal vote is lost. E.g if there are 2 candidates and they get A1: 0.5 (personal) 0.1 (party) A2: 0.7 (party) A1 is eliminated first. A2 gets the 0.1 party vote transferred and thus has 0.8 quotas and may not got a seat (depends on how much of the personal vote of A1 stays with the party). If A1 had been allowed to campaign normally, it might have gone A1: 0.5 (personal) 0.3 (party) A2 0.5 (party) A2 is eliminated and A1 gets 1.3 quotas and thus takes the seat. > There is also no risk of > the vote going to some irrelevant candidate (as in Woodall free riding). That is true. Apparently, the election reform society ran a PR-STV election and a candidate almost got elected by suggesting that people rank him 1 in order to use Woodall free riding. It is clearly better that if such a thing happens, at least you have elected a fellow party member. > This generalizes to any preference order, not only to the handling of the > first favourite. True, but it is probably not really worth the effort. You would be estimating the odds on the state of the count after many round. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
