On Gibbard-Satterthwaite, you are wrong. Please read the original papers; Wikipedia is not definitive here. There is a sense in which the sentence you quote from Wikipedia is not quite wrong, but that sense is so limited that the conclusion you draw from it is not supported.
In terms of the “craziest possible option” strategy: people may deliberately vote for something they believe will not win in order to “build up” voting power for later. When they decided to actually spend this built-up power, they would not vote for something crazy. Insofar as this strategy artificially increases their overall voting power over that of other voters, it undermines the fairness of the system. And in the worst case, it could backfire by actually electing a crazy option. In case of backfire, this would obviously not be a rational strategy ex post, but I believe the collective risk of such failed rationality is unacceptably high.
As for the “rich irony” of me calling something a nonstarter politically: just this week, approval voting passed in Fargo; and STAR voting came within a few percent of passing in Lane County, OR. Last summer, thousands of people voted on the Hugo Awards which had been nominated through E Pluribus Hugo. In British Columbia, voters are currently deciding between four election methods, three of which are proportional and two to three of which have never been used. I personally played a meaningful role in each of these efforts, and a pivotal role in some cases. All of these are clearly far beyond “nonstarter politically”. So yes, I’m not afraid to tilt at windmills sometimes, but sometimes the windmills actually are giants, and sometimes the giants lose. I believe I’ve earned some right to express an opinion about when that might be, and when it might not.
On Gibbard-Satterthwaite, you are wrong. Please read the original papers; Wikipedia is not definitive here. There is a sense in which the sentence you quote from Wikipedia is not quite wrong, but that sense is so limited that the conclusion you draw from it is not supported.
In terms of the “craziest possible option” strategy: people may deliberately vote for something they believe will not win in order to “build up” voting power for later. When they decided to actually spend this built-up power, they would not vote for something crazy. Insofar as this strategy artificially increases their overall voting power over that of other voters, it undermines the fairness of the system. And in the worst case, it could backfire by actually electing a crazy option. In case of backfire, this would obviously not be a rational strategy ex post, but I believe the collective risk of such failed rationality is unacceptably high.
As for the “rich irony” of me calling something a nonstarter politically: just this week, approval voting passed in Fargo; and STAR voting came within a few percent of passing in Lane County, OR. Last summer, thousands of people voted on the Hugo Awards which had been nominated through E Pluribus Hugo. In British Columbia, voters are currently deciding between four election methods, three of which are proportional and two to three of which have never been used. I personally played a meaningful role in each of these efforts, and a pivotal role in some cases. All of these are clearly far beyond “nonstarter politically”. So yes, I’m not afraid to tilt at windmills sometimes, but sometimes the windmills actually are giants, and sometimes the giants lose. I believe I’ve earned some right to express an opinion about when that might be, and when it might not.