Expansive sincerity — tactical maximization, up-voting, the hedge¶

Level: 201 · for voters

One of the four kinds of insincere vote. Expansive sincerity is the upward erasure: you keep your favorite at the top and raise someone else to join them — usually a front-runner you can tolerate, as insurance against one you can't.

It is the insincere vote that looks generous, which is why almost nobody warns you about it. You betrayed nobody. You buried nobody. You lowered nobody. You just gave the acceptable front-runner a 5 as well, "to be safe."

What you actually said on that ballot was: "I have no preference between these two." If they turn out to be the two who matter, the count will believe you.

Where it can even happen¶

Expansive sincerity needs a ballot with a volume knob — somewhere to put support that isn't ordering. That narrows it sharply:

Ballot	Up-voting available?
Score / STAR (0–5)	✅ raise any candidate to any level, independently
Approval (yes/no)	✅ this is the Approval strategy — approve one more than you mean
Ranked (IRV, Ranked Robin, STV)	❌ order is zero-sum — raising one candidate lowers another, which makes it compromising or burial, not up-voting
Choose-One	❌ one mark, nothing to raise

So this is a strategy that exists because rated ballots let you support two people at once — the same feature that makes equal-top scoring free and lets you avoid favorite betrayal in the first place. It is worth being precise about that trade rather than pretending rated ballots removed strategy: they removed the forced strategy and left an optional one whose costs you can see and reason about.

In STAR: your hedge is loud in round one and silent in round two¶

A STAR score does two different jobs. In the scoring round it decides who the two finalists are — there, a 5 is worth five times a 1. In the automatic runoff only order is read — there, a 5-vs-4 and a 5-vs-0 count exactly the same, and a 5-vs-5 counts as Equal Support: you sit the runoff out.

Put those together and the hedge has a precise failure mode. You spend real points helping your hedge reach the final two, and then have nothing left to say if they get there against your favorite.

Nine voters, worked in full — a neighborhood association picking a chair between Alma, Bruno and Celia. Alma's four core members honestly score Bruno a 3 and Celia a 0. Honest ballots elect Alma, 5–4 in the runoff, with all nine voters expressing a preference. Then the four hedge — Bruno 3 → 5, nothing else changed, Alma still at 5:

[Divergence from STAR]
  STAR                   = Bruno
  Choose-One (Plurality) = Alma   (differs from STAR)
  RCV-IRV                = Alma   (differs from STAR)
  Note: 4 of 9 ballots (44%) had equal non-zero scores, so their ranks were
        decided by candidate priority order. The RCV-IRV result may be an
        artifact of score-to-rank tie-breaking rather than a deep
        difference.
  Note: Ranked Robin (RCV-RR) agrees with STAR, so RCV-IRV is the lone
        outlier — the classic center-squeeze signature.
  Full round-by-round reports (generated for review):
  RCV-IRV rounds: cases_tabulated/tactical_max_c3_b9_hedged_RCV-IRV_tabulated.txt

--- STAR Voting Method (single winner) ---

[STAR Voting]
 Tabulating 9 ballots.
Count × Alma,Bruno,Celia
    4 ×    5,    5,    0
    3 ×    1,    5,    3
    1 ×    4,    2,    1
    1 ×    0,    2,    5

[STAR Voting: Scoring Round]
 The two highest-scoring candidates advance to the next round.
   Bruno         -- 39 -- First place
   Alma          -- 27 -- Second place
   Celia         -- 15
 Bruno and Alma advance.

[STAR Voting: Automatic Runoff Round]
 The candidate preferred in the most head-to-head matchups wins.
   Bruno         -- 4 -- First place
   Alma          -- 1
   Equal Support -- 4
 Bruno wins.
   Runoff math:
     9  ballots cast
   − 4  Equal Support (no preference between the two finalists)
     ─
     5  voters with a preference  (majority = 3)
           Bruno 4 (80%)  ·  Alma 1 (20%)

[STAR Voting: Winner — STAR Voting Method (single winner)]
 Bruno

Bruno wins. Voters with a preference: 5 of 9 (4 Equal Support) — the four hedgers removed themselves from the only comparison they cared about, and Alma's 5–4 win became a 4–1 loss. Celia, the candidate they were insuring against, finished third on 15 points and never reached the runoff in either version.

Both halves, the ballot table, and the general rule: the worked STAR up-voting pair.

In Approval: the other half of the threshold dilemma¶

Approval has no volume, only a line — so up-voting means approving one more candidate than you honestly endorse, typically the tolerable front-runner. This is the exact mirror of bullet voting, and Approval's central critique is that a voter must choose between them with no honest guidance:

Approve only your favorite → you may fail to stop the candidate you can't stand.
Approve the front-runner too → your two marks cancel each other in the only matchup that was ever in doubt.

Approval can't split the difference, because there is nothing between yes and no. That's the dilemma stated fairly — and the reason the approval threshold is called Approval's free parameter rather than its flaw: on one reading of what a checkmark means, no Approval ballot is insincere at all (the three readings, and what each does to the strategy question).

Watch it decide an election: Exercise 13 — where do you draw the line? runs one set of honest opinions at three different thresholds and gets three different winners.

The fix is one point, and it's honest¶

STAR's answer to the hedging instinct isn't "don't hedge" — it's hedge with a 4:

5 for your favorite, 4 for the hedge. The hedge gets 80% of the score support a 5 would have given them, so your insurance is nearly intact — and your ballot still carries a full vote for your favorite if the two of them meet in the runoff.
Equal scores stay available for real indifference. If you genuinely don't care which of two candidates wins, saying so is correct, and the runoff line reports your Equal Support instead of inventing a preference. See runoff percentages.

That's the practical shape of "use the whole scale," and it is why STAR's honest advice fits in a sentence: show your real order, and use every level you've got.

Reading this fairly¶

This is a mistake voters make against themselves, not a defect the count introduced — STAR counted a stated indifference as indifference, which is the only thing it could honestly do. But it belongs on the honest-limits ledger anyway, for one reason: it means a rated ballot has a wrong way to fill it in that feels generous. A voter who hedges to a 5 out of anxiety has given up something real, and nothing on the ballot tells them so. That's an argument for teaching the runoff, not an argument against the method — the same way "rank all the candidates" is the thing ranked-ballot advocates have to teach.

The mirror-image mistake — flattening people downward to 0 — is restrictive sincerity, and it fails for the same structural reason: erasing a preference you actually hold leaves you mute in the round where it mattered.

file: expansive_sincerity.md¶