The point is that whatever solution you propose, you have to justify why it is “good”, and you have to use some moral theory to explain what’s “good” about it (I feel that democracy is naturally utilitarian, but maybe other theories can be used too).
For example, take your problem 0, Dark Horse. Why is this a problem, why is it “bad”? I can easily imagine an election where this dark horse wins and everyone is ok with that. The dark horse is only a problem if most people are unhappy with the outcome, i.e. if VSE is low. There is nothing inherently bad about a dark horse winning elections. There is no other way to justify that your problem 0 is in fact a problem.
strategy models [VSE] is built on are very simple
Of course, the simulations of what the voters would do, used in computing the VSE, are imperfect. Also, the initial distribution of voter’s true utilities might not match reality very well. Both of those points need work. For the former, I feel that the space of possible strategies should be machine-searchable, (although there is no point to account for a strategy if nobody is going to use it). For the latter, I wonder how well polling works, maybe if you just ask the voter about their preferences (in a way different from the election itself), they are more likely to be honest.
The point is that whatever solution you propose, you have to justify why it is “good”, and you have to use some moral theory to explain what’s “good” about it (I feel that democracy is naturally utilitarian, but maybe other theories can be used too).
For example, take your problem 0, Dark Horse. Why is this a problem, why is it “bad”? I can easily imagine an election where this dark horse wins and everyone is ok with that. The dark horse is only a problem if most people are unhappy with the outcome, i.e. if VSE is low. There is nothing inherently bad about a dark horse winning elections. There is no other way to justify that your problem 0 is in fact a problem.
Of course, the simulations of what the voters would do, used in computing the VSE, are imperfect. Also, the initial distribution of voter’s true utilities might not match reality very well. Both of those points need work. For the former, I feel that the space of possible strategies should be machine-searchable, (although there is no point to account for a strategy if nobody is going to use it). For the latter, I wonder how well polling works, maybe if you just ask the voter about their preferences (in a way different from the election itself), they are more likely to be honest.
I wrote a separate article discussing the pathologies, in which I gave utility-based examples of why they’re problematic. This discussion would probably be better there.