Comment by Dylan16807

> A B X Y

It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular.

> Score voting is a Condorcet method.

That gains it a point but there are much better methods. Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike. Then the guarantee of the pairwise winner coming out on top is actually using accurate information on what everyone wants.

> Except that doesn't really help them because doing that also makes it more likely that their least favorite candidate wins, which is a significant incentive not to do it. The only reason to do that is if you're confident your favored candidate could only lose to your second choice, in which case it was really a two candidate race to begin with.

If I'm moderately confident then I'm likely to do it despite the risk.

> It doesn't matter if they're in the same party or not.

The whole framing of the problem was that one of the candidates in the minority party wins. If there are four unrelated candidates that problem goes away. The more popular moderate won, not a big deal.