Tactical Voting - Views On Tactical Voting

Views On Tactical Voting

Some people view tactical voting as providing misleading information. In this view, a ballot paper is asking the question "which of these candidates is the best?". This means that if one votes for a candidate who one does not believe is the best, then one is lying. British Labour Party politician Anne Begg warned of the dangers of tactical voting:

"Tactical voting is fine in theory and as an intellectual discussion in the drawing room or living rooms around the country, but when you actually get to polling day and you have to vote against your principles, then it is much harder to do."

Tactical voting is commonly regarded as a problem, since it makes the actual ballot into a nontrivial game, where voters react and counter-react to what they expect other voters' strategies to be. British mathematician Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) was, apparently, the first to acknowledge this fact. A game such as this might even result in a worse alternative being chosen, because most of the voters used it as a strategic tool. However the existence of limited tactical voting can be thought to increase the quality of the candidates elected because it takes into account not just the "ranking" of the candidates but also the utilities.

Though Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem prove that any useful single-winner voting system based on preference ranking is prone to some kind of manipulation, some use game theory to search for some kind of "minimally manipulatable" (incentive compatibility) voting schemes.

Game theory can also be used to analyze the pros and cons of different methods. For instance, under purely honest voting, Condorcet method-like systems tend to settle on compromise candidates, while Instant-Runoff Voting favors those candidates which have strong core support - who may often be more extremist. An electorate using one of these two systems but which (in the general or the specific case) preferred the characteristics of the other system could consciously use strategy to achieve a result more characteristic of the other system. Under Condorcet, they may be able to win by "burying" the compromise candidate (although this risks throwing the election to the opposing extreme); while under IRV, they could always "compromise". It could be argued that in this case the option to vote tactically or not actually helps the electorate express its will, not only on which candidate is better, but on whether compromise is desirable. (This never applies to "sneakier" tactics such as push-over.)

Tactical voting greatly complicates the comparative analysis of voting systems. If tactical voting were to become significant, the perceived "advantages" of a given voting system (that is, tending towards compromise or favoring core support) could turn into disadvantages - and, more surprisingly, vice versa.