Thank you for diving into the details! And, to be clear, I am not taking issue with any of Gibbard’s proof itself—if you found an error in his arguments, that’s your own victory, please claim it! Instead, what I point to is Gibbard’s method of DATA-COLLECTION.
Gibbard pre-supposes that the ONLY data to be collected from voters is a SINGULAR election’s List of Preferences. And, I agree with Gibbard in his conclusion, regarding such a data-set: “IF you ONLY collect a single election’s ranked preferences, then YES, there is no way to avoid strategic voting, unless you have only one or two candidates.”
However, that Data-Set Gibbard chose is NOT the only option. In a Bank, they detect Fraudulent Transactions by placing each customer’s ‘lifetime profile’ into a Cluster (cluster analysis). When that customer’s behavior jumps OUTSIDE of their cluster, you raise a red flag of fraud. This is empirically capable of detecting what is mathematically equivalent to ‘strategic voting’.
So, IF each voter’s ‘lifetime profile’ was fed into a Variational Auto-Encoder, to be placed within some Latent Space, within a Cluster of similarly-minded folks, THEN we can see if they are being strategic in any particular election: if their list of preferences jumps outside of their cluster, they are lying about their preferences. Ignore those votes, safely protecting your ballot from manipulation.
Do you see how this does not depend upon Gibbard being right or wrong in his proof? As well as the fact that I do NOT disagree with his conclusion that “strategy-proof voting with more than two candidates is not possible IF you ONLY collect a SINGLE preference-list as your one-time ballot”?
Thank you for diving into the details! And, to be clear, I am not taking issue with any of Gibbard’s proof itself—if you found an error in his arguments, that’s your own victory, please claim it! Instead, what I point to is Gibbard’s method of DATA-COLLECTION.
Gibbard pre-supposes that the ONLY data to be collected from voters is a SINGULAR election’s List of Preferences. And, I agree with Gibbard in his conclusion, regarding such a data-set: “IF you ONLY collect a single election’s ranked preferences, then YES, there is no way to avoid strategic voting, unless you have only one or two candidates.”
However, that Data-Set Gibbard chose is NOT the only option. In a Bank, they detect Fraudulent Transactions by placing each customer’s ‘lifetime profile’ into a Cluster (cluster analysis). When that customer’s behavior jumps OUTSIDE of their cluster, you raise a red flag of fraud. This is empirically capable of detecting what is mathematically equivalent to ‘strategic voting’.
So, IF each voter’s ‘lifetime profile’ was fed into a Variational Auto-Encoder, to be placed within some Latent Space, within a Cluster of similarly-minded folks, THEN we can see if they are being strategic in any particular election: if their list of preferences jumps outside of their cluster, they are lying about their preferences. Ignore those votes, safely protecting your ballot from manipulation.
Do you see how this does not depend upon Gibbard being right or wrong in his proof? As well as the fact that I do NOT disagree with his conclusion that “strategy-proof voting with more than two candidates is not possible IF you ONLY collect a SINGLE preference-list as your one-time ballot”?