[Wikipedia-l] Don't waste your vote!

Tim Starling tstarling at wikimedia.org
Sun Jul 1 12:40:02 UTC 2007


Søren Kiersted wrote:
> On 6/30/07, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 7/1/07, Søren Kiersted <wisewisard at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>> There are three seats open. When you make your three choices...
>> You don't have to make three choices. It's approval voting, so you can
>> vote for as many people as you like. If you're concerned about one bad
>> person being on the board, you can vote for everyone else, not just
>> the three you think can win.
> 
> Then your vote is diluted and carries less power to keep someone off,
> since many of the choices have no chance of winning.  If you select
> only the most popular who are not bad your vote stayed focused.

I'll reply to this post since it's the most obviously wrong of Søren's
posts without being confusing.

Votes are not diluted.

I could invent a fictional voting method where you were right, where
voting for A, B, C and D gave 1/4 of a point to each, and voting for A
alone gave a whole 1 point to A. But that's not how it is.

Voting for A, B, C and D gives one whole point to each of them. Voting for
A alone gives one point to A. I can say this with authority because I
wrote the voting and tallying software that we are using.

So there is nothing harmful in voting for a candidate that you approve of,
but believe has no chance of winning. As the Wikipedia article will tell you:

"The theoretically optimal tactic is to vote for those candidates whom you
prefer to the expected outcome of the election (the average utility of the
candidates weighted by their probabilities of victory)."

So if you think evil B will win (i.e. B is the expected outcome), and you
would prefer anyone other than B, then you should vote for everyone except B.

-- Tim Starling




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