I have studied strategic manipulation of voting rules in some detail, and it never occurred to me to question the basic assumption that manipulation (misrepresentation of a group of voters of their sincere preferences, thereby achieving a better outcome than if they had voted sincerely) is bad. It is unavoidable by Gibbard-Satterthwaite. A large number of papers have been devoted to trying to minimize its occurrence.

However, some people are now arguing that it might be a good thing, for example papers by Aki Lehtinen and by Keith Dowding and Martin van Hees. The reasons include maximization of total social welfare (utilitarian argument) and improvements to the democratic process through upskilling of voters.  It is not that often that I find such a basic assumption questioned, and it is very refreshing. Most of the mathematical techniques that I know can be used to analyse this new framework, and I will definitely be looking at doing so.

It is always good to remember the difference between mathematical models and reality. A coauthor and I recently had a paper on voting rejected by an economics journal because the assumptions we made were considered to be too unrealistic. Then a friend sent me a link to a fascinating New York Times magazine article that discusses the difficulties of automated vote counting. It seems that in practice (in the USA at least) the error rates of electronic voting machines are enormous, the source code is not available, the election workers are not properly trained, etc.

New Zealand still uses paper ballots, although I am not sure how they are counted. For large electorates such as in the USA, some form of automation is probably necessary. Given the inclusive nature of the voting process, and the multitude of errors that voters can make, it is obviously quite difficult to come up with a voting process that is simple enough for voters and yet amenable to quick and accurate tallying, and the possibility of recounts.

A salutary reminder of the need to balance theory and practice!