Strategic nomination

Strategic nomination is the manipulation of an election by its candidate set. It is different from tactical voting in which the manipulation comes from the voters. It is different also from campaign strategy, the methods candidates employ in political campaigns to win an election after the nomination.

If the winner of an election were not running in the first place, then obviously someone else would have won instead. Similarly, if a candidate gets "added" to an election, it becomes possible for the new candidate to win. If these are the only cases in which a change in the candidate set leads to a different election outcome, then the voting system is independent of irrelevant alternatives and therefore immune to strategic nomination.

Independence of irrelevant alternatives, however, is a very hard property for a voting system to satisfy. This is illustrated by the following example of Condorcet's voting paradox:

With the above preferences and whatever candidate an election method chooses as a winner, another candidate can always secure a majority of votes against that winner by removing the third candidate. Since the absence of any candidate would leave the impression that the preference of the group of voters as a whole is a clear majority when by definition it is not when we consider the third candidate, one can argue that none of these candidates are actually "irrelevant."

The candidates in the example above form a cycle known as the Smith set - their combined presence provides conflicting information (both to the election system as well as to observers) about who the greatest candidate is. Strategic nomination, then, involves hiding this information from the voting system by excluding one of the candidates. Because of this strange relationship between the candidates and the voters, strategic nomination through this manner is doubtful as it becomes very much a question of whether the presence or absence in an election of a potential "cycle-maker" (provided one exists and can be found) can be decided by those who seek to gain from it.

In order to simplify the issue, academic attention sometimes focuses on a specific kind of strategic nomination: the kind that involves clones. Clones in this context are candidates such that every voter ranks them the same relative to every other candidate, i.e. two clones of each other are never both strictly separated by a third member in the preference ranking of any voter, unless that member is also a fellow clone. Trivially, the set of all candidates makes up a clone set as does every subset consisting of one candidate. It thus makes no sense to just call a candidate a clone unless it is in the context of a clone set which contains at least two elements and is a proper subset of the set of all candidates.

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