Tactical voting

In voting systems, tactical voting (or strategic voting) occurs when a voter misrepresents his or her sincere preferences in order to gain a more favorable outcome.

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Although it is desirable for a democratic system to encourage voters to express sincere preferences, it has been shown by the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem that any voting method which is completely strategy-free must be nondeterministic (that is, might not select the same outcome every time it is applied to the same set of ballots). For instance, the random ballot voting method, which randomly selects the ballot of a single voter and uses this to determine the outcome, is strategy-free, but may result in different choices being selected if applied multiple times to the same set of ballots.

Related Topics:
Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem - Random ballot

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However, although no practical method is strategy-free, the type of tactical voting and the extent to which it affects the timbre of the campaign and the results of the election vary dramatically from one voting system to another.

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