Strategic voting and the borda method

It is more likely that strategic voting will occur when the number of voters is small, such as in a committee, and outcomes more directly affect them. As the number of electors and candidates increases, however, the correct strategy becomes less clear. Opinion polls can indicate preference patterns and voting strength, however, and this can be used by campaign managers to discover the best strategy. It may be expected that they will tell the supporters of their candidate how best to use their votes. Thus, even in situations where there are many voters and more than two candidates, it can be expected that voters will tend to vote strategically because of the activities of political managers. Given this model, voters tend not to vote their preferences, even though it is possible for them to do so. The best outcome which might occur is for the plurality candidate to be elected, as would be the case in a one-vote election. It has been shown, however, that rational action by the voters could result in the second preferred, or least preferred, candidate being elected. In no case was it shown that the best action was to vote one's preference if it is other than the best vote for the first choice and the worst vote for all other candidates. It has not been demonstrated that a rank-preference voting system, such as the one used in the model, will never result in the preferences of the electorate producing the most preferred candidate. What has been demonstrated is that not only will such preference voting systems not always produce this result, but that rational action by voters will not tend to result in the preferences of the electorate being used to determine the most preferred candidate. The implications of this analysis are that remedies for the defects of a single-vote election method based upon preference revelation are not without operational defects themselves. Operationally, they depend upon voters revealing their preferences even if there are incentives to misrepresent them. If the one-vote election method is to be replaced with one that is better able to select the “most preferred” candidate, preference ranking methods may be found operationally wanting. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Social Sciences Division 1978