Talk:Strategic voting

message: There is significant content in the Single Transferable Vote article about tactical voting in STV systems.  Should it be moved here, or linked from here, or both? Scott Ritchie 20:43, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  STV Tactical Voting 

message: "Since Arrow's impossibility theorem proves that any voting system is arguably undemocratic in at least some case"
Could anyone please explain to me why this claim deserves to be here? I would take it off. Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite show that any 'democratic' method is prone to manipulatable situations. 
Not that voting is un-democratic. It says life is complicated, not that life is wrong. mousomer 09:25, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arrow's theorem 

message: "The Borda count has a both a strong compromising incentive and a large vulnerability to burying." Is this really true? If I'm not mistaken, then a large proportion of voters need to employ both in order to make a significant change - see Borda count#Potential for tactical voting.  Common Man 11:13, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Borda vulnerability 

message: I changed the line "that is, might not select the same outcome every time it is applied to the same set of ballots" to "that is, might not select the same outcome every time it is applied to the same set of voter prefrences" Because most methods will choose the same canidate If the ballots are the same, but with a diffrent amount canidates could choose a diffrent one.24.237.198.91 01:29, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: explaining edit

message: I think the following or similar reference should be added:
Universal Voting Protocol Tweaks to Make Manipulation Hard (2003), Vincent Conitzer, Tuomas Sandholm
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/conitzer03universal.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/voting_tweaks.ijcai03.pdf
From the "Abstract"
Voting is a general method for preference aggregation in multiagent settings, but seminal results have shown that all (nondictatorial) voting protocols are manipulable. One could try to avoid manipulation by using voting protocols where determining a beneficial manipulation is hard computationally. A number of recent papers study the complexity
of manipulating existing protocols. This paper is the first work to take the next step of designing new protocols that are especially hard to manipulate. Rather than designing these new protocols from scratch, we instead show how to tweak existing
protocols to make manipulation hard...
The protocols become NP-hard, #P-hard, or PSPACE-hard to manipulate... 
These are the first results in voting settings where manipulation is in a higher complexity class than NP (presuming PSPACE ≠ NP).
I need a feedback about this. Or, if sure, please add such or similar reference...
--Y2y 11:06, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to make manipulation computationally hard? 

message: It seems to me worthwhile to point out -- and I thought I once had, but perhaps not here -- that while 'strategic' and 'tactical' are usually used to distinguish behaviors in a disjoint set, here they counterintuitively mean the same thing, which is the topic of the article.  If in fact everyone agrees that a) this is true and b) it's worth mentioning... where should it go?  I'd think a parenthetical in the lede, but the lede diverges pretty rapidly right now from graf to graf...--Baylink 19:23, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's worth mentioning too, tactical and strategic means two differents things, and the article is named "Tactical voting" after all, explaining "tactical vs strategic" is necessary. However as english is not my native language and I'm novice in voting studies, I don't know where it should go too. --88.177.158.231 (talk) 02:41, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Tactical' v 'Strategic' 

message: I've put a rewrite tag on this article, because the overall tone appears to be somewhat negative. I've attempted to clean up the introduction, however the rest of the article needs work. Addhoc 16:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Can you cite specific examples?  It looks great to me. ←BenB4 16:36, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite 

message: Because Approval Voting can be understood as asking the voter to set an Approval cutoff, and the votes then express the "sincere" opinion of the voter with regard to that cutoff, the application of "tactical" voting as meaning an insincere vote for desired effect is problematic. There is no advantage to insincere voting in Approval.
Voting "strategy" is another matter. The thinking that there is tactical voting in Approval is based on an idea that there is some absolute Approval or Disapproval for candidates, whereas, in fact, approval is always a relative term, dependent upon the alternatives presented. So in a real election, the voter will make judgments as to where to set the Approval cutoff, dependent upon what the voter considers possible. A great deal of confusion is caused by the name "Approval Voting," and this was shown in what I removed. The voter may set the approval cutoff anywhere without being insincere. (Or, more accurately, if the voter votes insincerely, by reversing preferences, the voter harms his or her own expected outcome.) Abd 03:10, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of Tactical Voting argument re Approval Voting. 

message: In the section discussing the rational choice voting formula, the author said that the rational plurality strategy is to choose the best of the "frontrunners". In fact, the highest prospective rating can theoretically belong to any candidate, including those who could under no definition be called frontrunners. The misconception was called, correctly, the "common" strategy. I kept that observation but corrected the context.Tomblikebomb (talk) 20:19, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rational Choice Voting is not the equivalent of Lesser-of-Two-Evils 

message: I don't see how instant runoff voting is vulnerable to the push-over strategy.  I'm not so confident that I'll edit it out, but could someone doublecheck this and explain it here or in the article if I'm wrong?  66.41.154.228 (talk) 05:03, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been researching these things for decades now, and I've never heard of a "push-over" strategy or tactic against runoff voting.  In the past, we have had trouble with complaints being based on small sets of contrived, anecdotal examples.  The peer-reviewed sources we have at Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical_voting seem entirely consistent with the likelihood that someone just made this up. GetLinkPrimitiveParams (talk) 04:12, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

text: It's extremely common for IRV to be vulnerable to pushover. A well-known example is the 2022 Alaska special election, where voters had an opportunity to support Palin, resulting in the elimination of Nick Begich (the Condorcet winner). –Maximum Limelihood Estimator 00:26, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  IRV vulnerability 

message: I would like to take issue with the following citation:
Authors of a 2004 paper in Public Choice disagreed, saying, "AV is one of the most susceptible systems to manipulation by small groups of voters (for example, small, maverick groups could determine the AV outcome.)"Saari, D.G. and Van Newenhizen, J. (2004) "Is approval voting an ‘unmitigated evil?’ A response to Brams, Fishburn, and Merrill" Public Choice 59(2) pp. 133-147.
If you read the source paper, then read the paper it's responding to, then read the original paper that started the thread, you eventually realize that for Saari a voting system is not a way of choosing a winner, but a way of rank ordering all of the candidates. So in this sentence, Saari could be saying (it's really quite unclear) that Approval is very susceptible to manipulation that would change last and second-to-last place "results" without changing the winner of the election. Of course: if both got only their own vote, any voter could simply vote for one of them on a whim and break the tie. This statement says nothing about the kind of tactical voting that is the subject of this article.
If Saari himself comes on here and clarifies his statement, I might consider it a RS for this article. Until then, I'm going to be bold and remove the statement. Homunq (talk) 04:43, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Unmitigated evil"? 

message: The paragraph highlighting the events leading to the 2003 California Gubernatorial recall election is wrong. California, at the time, did not have an open primary system for governor, where by Democratic voters could participate in the Republican primary between Richard Riordan and Bill Simon. Independent expenditure campaigns that were favorable to Davis' candidacy ran opposition against Riordan, so that Republican voters would select Simon as their gubernatorial candidate for the general election.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.235.223.217 (talk) 10:11, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I fact tagged it, I'm pretty sure you're correct (At least today as I voted in the CA gubernatorial primaries it was closed - one can only vote for candidates in a single pre-registered party). According to  CA has had a "modified closed primary" since 2001 and thus would have been in effect in 2002 and 2003. This was changed from the blanket primaries that the US Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. I will do some more research and determine whether I should change or excise this information from the article Valley2city‽ 01:42, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  2003 California Recall 

message: The Winchester by-election is not a good one, so I have commented it out and will delete it unless there's a huge demand for it to stay. There were only around 6.5k Labour voters at the previous general election, so (most of) them switching cannot be the cause of a 21k majority! Less than 6k of the new LibDem majority can be attributed to such tactical voting and far more of it came from previous Tory voters saying, in effect, to Malone 'you lost, stop whining'. 
If you want a UK by-election example, there are numerous better ones (eg Greenwich 1987, where on polling day the SDP/Liberal Alliance campaign called on voters who said they would vote Conservative to remind them to vote on the basis that their favoured candidate was known to be third in opinion polls, so many of them would vote for the SDP candidate who could beat Labour. The result was SDP/Liberal Alliance candidate up 28%, Labour candidate down 4%, Conservative down 24% = SDP/Liberal Alliance win... down to tactical voting.)
There are probably enough examples in the section already though. Lovingboth (talk) 10:10, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Real life examples 

message: I'm removing the comment on AV in the STV section, since AV is already covered in another section (albeit under a different name)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.6.96.22 (talk) 19:42, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Boldly changing... 

message: The whole section is purely conjectures and opinions. Although I personally agree with most of them, they are not grounded in any theoretical/empirical or other research. The "citation needed" remarks there are from 2011, and no one added a citation. Better to just remove the section in my opinion.
I removed one sentence that was plain wrong (about Charles Dodgson being to first to consider the problems in tactical voting). 
140.247.61.228 (talk) 22:12, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Views on Tactical voting 

message: Just a suggestion that someone with the relevant knowledge could add the real life example of the recent primary in Mississippi (USA) where a significant number of majority Democrat African-American voted in the Republican primary in favor of the incumbent. Also United States Senate Republican primary election in Mississippi, 2014 Pariah24 (talk) 12:55, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  2014 Mississippi primary 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I propose that Crossover voting be merged into Tactical voting. Tactical voting is defined as  whereas crossover voting  - this seems to me a type of tactical voting and would be better served in the tactical voting article. - Thunderstorm008 (talk) 09:32, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Oppose merge, as crossover voting is specially an American concept (given its dependence on party affiliation) and may be genuine or tactical. Klbrain (talk) 20:47, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Closing, given the uncontested objection and no support. Klbrain (talk) 22:44, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Seriously.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.17.149.1 (talk) 02:57, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Puerto Rico is not an "Other Country" when the US is mentioned explicitly. 

message: The ngram shows a 4x more frequent usage of strategic voting compared to tactical voting. Suggest changing lemma to strategic voting. HudecEmil (talk) 19:30, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Changed HudecEmil (talk) 17:23, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move to Strategic voting