Re: Another proposal.

[Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.net>]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 05:45:03PM -0500, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 01:53:46PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > The default option isn't
> > something you can be particularly "sincere" about
> 
> Your point here being that even if the default wins, the vote will
> be held again, and little is lost.  Yes?

Here's a way of looking at it:  Even if the voter thinks, in his
heart of hearts, that A and B are both better than nothing, he can
still be sincere about preferring "no action" to either or both, _in
any given vote_.  This could be considered manipulative and
dishonest in some senses--or, it could be considered politically
savvy.  But from a voting point of view, the preference for "further
discussion" is sincere and not strategic.

I think a voting method should discourage voting strategy, not
political strategy.  So it's absolutely ok if ranking "further
discussion" higher causes "further discussion" to win; but not ok if
it causes another option to win.  (Indeed, this is one of the
criteria for a voting system on electionmethods.org.)

Eliminate early leads to voting strategy, which leads to madness (in
the form of difficult to analyze situations and voter uncertainty).

Andrew