Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A B X Y It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular. > Score voting is a Condorcet method. That gains it a point but there are much better methods. Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike. Then the guarantee of the pairwise winner coming out on top is actually using accurate information on what everyone wants.…
> It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular. It's easy to hate the candidate on the opposite extreme from the way you lean, so all this really requires is for the extremist on your side to be a corrupt populist who gets support by telling people the lies they want to hear or is paying off the right people to get favorable media coverage or valuable endorsements. Or is…
They do not. There are voting methods where I feel they work well enough that I don't worry about strategy, and I don't worry about what threshold to use for approval, I just rank choices honestly and then I'm done.
> Suppose your true ratings would be 10 for your most preferred candidate, 7 for the second best and 1 for the inhuman monster the opposing tribe somehow supports for no explicable reason. Polls say your first choice is expected to score ~5, your second choice ~6 and your vile enemy ~4, but all of these are plus or minus 2 points or more because polls are practically random number generators. What are you going to do?
In this situation the strategy play is that I rate both of the first two at 10. I'm not risking #3 by being strategic, I'm risking that I get #2 when I could have gotten #1.
For the situation where I might strategically lower the score, it's when there's a 10, there's a 7, there's a 4, and there's a 1. Do I give the 4 an honest rating that might help them win over the candidates I like, or do I give them a 1 and pray really hard that neither of the two guys I hate win? It's a tough choice.
> Suppose it's California and a Republican, a Democrat and a member of the Green Party are in the race.
This is a totally different situation. In the last version there were two moderates and one of them won. It was fine. In this version there's one middle candidate and they lose. But we already did this scenario earlier. I said "Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that." So not just an instant runoff, but keeping the ranking system.