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prase comments on Imperfect Voting Systems - Less Wrong
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I am not sure. Quite a realistic, although a bit different situation may be this: There are three candidates - White, Gray and Black. White and Black are opposed to each other while Gray is somewhere inbetween. Thus the preferences of White supporters are W > G > B and the preferences of Black supporters are B > G > W. The Grays are split equally between G > B > W and G > W > B.
Now suppose that the distribution of supporters is 40 for White and 30 - 30 Gray and Black. You are a White supporter. If you vote according to you real preferences, i.e. first W, second G, you make it likely that Gray makes it to the second round where he wins due to the transferred Black votes. So you should instead vote tactically first B, second W, which would help Black into the second round where he will be eliminated by White who has stronger overall support.
That's not a safe strategy with less than perfect information. If as few as 5 of those gray-supporters vote black secondary when you thought they'd vote white, you've just handed the election to your worst enemy, when by voting honestly you could have had the moderate, agreeable-to-all candidate.
As a wider assortment of fringe parties become involved, perhaps emboldened by their nonnegligible first-round numbers, that sort of strategy becomes more sensitive to secondary (and tertiary, etc.) preferences. As part of that same increasing complexity, secondary preferences become more difficult to meaningfully survey in advance.
Sure, but you can be nearly indifferent between Gray and Black, or simply take the risk.