On Mar 6, 2010, at 2:34 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 1:34 AM, robert bristow-johnson
<r...@audioimagination.com> wrote:
i almost never vote for all 6. usually just 2. but it's a
strategic vote. and since i didn't hit the limit, it's
practically no different than Approval voting. i cannot see how
Warren and company claim that it's less strategic than Condorcet.
Assuming 6 seats, optimal strategy is probably to approve either the
6th or 7th most popular candidate and all candidates you prefer to
that candidate. If you run out of votes, the you should approve
candidates who are most likely to tie for the 6th seat first before
other candidates.
In any case, you really should cast all 6 votes.
i don't get it. just because the party i most identify with proffers
6 candidates (as does two or three other parties) doesn't mean that
i, as a independently-minded voter, care if all of those candidates
are elected. if i "approve" of *all* of those candidates, it's only
because of blind party affiliation.
but what if there is *one* (or maybe two) of those candidates that i
take an affirmative interest in seeing elected? that is, i would
really like to see that one candidate elected more than i would want
to see any other candidate, including those others in my party that i
*might* have tepid approval for. i know that, even being in the same
party, those other candidates *are* effectively running against the
candidate i like. it's not just the candidate from the other parties
that are running against my preferred candidate. voting for *any*
other candidate (by me or by any other voter) independently of the
party that other candidate is from, reduces the likelihood of my
preferred candidate getting elected.
i know that if my candidate *is* elected, 5 other candidates will
also be elected but i have much less interest in who those 5 will
be. or, i might recognize some of those candidates to be shoe-ins
and that they'll likely be elected from the support they are
receiving elsewhere. so, if that were the political interests i am
bringing to the polls, why would i choose to harm the chances of this
candidate i really like, by approving any other candidate?
i actually think that, even in a multi-winner election, that
Condorcet ordering of the candidates could make sense (with the top 6
preferred candidates elected). of course there is a problem if there
is a cycle that is transected by the cutoff boundary of the top 6 who
get elected and those lower who do not. i am not seriously proposing
actually implementing this without some serious study, and a good
method (perhaps Ranked Pairs or Schulze) would be needed to deal with
a cycle that crosses the win/lose boundary.
that said, Approval voting requires more strategy from me than just
ranking candidates in my preferred order. whether it's a single or
multi-winner election, i really think that the ranked ballot is the
simplest way to extract necessary information from voters, without
expecting too much from voters (which is what Range or Score voting
does).
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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