# Manipulations in Democracy?

## TL;DR

The paper explores how private signals can influence voter sincerity in democratic processes, potentially leading to manipulation.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a symmetric dichotomous choice model to analyze incentives for sincere or insincere voting.

## Key findings

- Sincere voting is an equilibrium when voters receive private signals.
- Modifying the model can create incentives for insincere voting.
- Even with uniform signal precision, voters may act insincerely.

## Abstract

Democracy is upheld through the principle of majority rule. To validate the application of democracy, it is imperative to assess the sincerity of voter decisions. When voter sincerity is compromised, manipulation may occur, thereby undermining the legitimacy of democratic processes. This paper presents a general version of a symmetric dichotomous choice model. Using simple majority rule, we show that when a voter receives one or more private signals, sincere voting is an equilibrium behavior. A slight change to this basic model may create an incentive to vote insincerely. We show that even in a more restricted model where every voter receives only one private signal whose level of precision is the same for all the voters but depends on the state of nature, voters may have an incentive to vote insincerely.