| > it's impossible to completely eliminate strategic voting. No matter the method: ranked vs. cardinal vs. anything else you dream up can't help. I think this comment is a defeatist at best and deceitful at worst. Just because there is no global optimization does not mean that all optima are equal. We can in fact have optima that are better than one another (including all optima we know about!). This is a common feature of highly dimensional solution spaces. The big issue here is that not all criteria are weighted equally, by desire of effectiveness. So we find an optima where we optimize features that have a large weights and care less about optimizing features with small weights. By doing this we can compare systems in their desirability and select the best ones. This is not cause for throwing up your hands and giving up. As an example: cardinal systems, when compared to ordinal (ranked) systems, are more resilient to strategic voting and simpler (both for the voter and for the people tallying the votes, aka transparency). The cost? Slight decrease in maximal VSE. BUT if we look at the min, mean, median, or modes of VSE given different strategies cardinal system outperform ordinal (aka, desirable). You can see this by comparing with this chart[0]. For example with STAR0-10 we have maximal VSE of .983 and minimal of .912 (actually this makes it strictly better than plurality!). But if we look at our best ordian, RP, we see RP has a maximal VSE of .988 and minimal of .870. So on terms of maximal there's a 0.005 difference but on minimal there's a difference of 0.042! We can easily tell here that STAR is much more resistant to strategic voting than RP (Shulze is even worse!). Doing the same for IRV we see .07/.115 (max/min comparison of STAR0-10 vs IRV on VSE). So we can compare. We can select better methods. But is there a ''perfect,, solution? No. But don't let the lack of the ability to create a perfect system detract from the ability to compare systems. Not all is lost. [0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html |
Wow, very HN! I don't actually mind very much, but seriously, consider applying the principle of charity?
I agree with you, and did before you wrote this comment too! Hence my use of the word "completely". I was just surprised that strategic voting couldn't be completely eliminated; before yesterday I expected that you could, in exchange for losing other nice properties. Of course being impossible to eliminate completely doesn't mean it shouldn't be minimized.