In the prisoner's dilemma, there's an element of trust involved, or uncertainty. "Will they or won't they rat me out?" That is the issue for people in this mental exercise or game theory.
The basis of the theory is "I want to respond as they respond in order to get the best possible solution".
If they're going to talk to get a deal, you should want to talk first. If they're going to stay silent, you should want to stay silent.
Similarly, if they're going to commit VF, you should commit VF first. If they aren't going to, you shouldn't.
Given the fact that there is zero trust involved for Democrat voter fraud, there is no actual dilemma. You should commit VF under the Game Theory because they will.'
Its illegal. Its not advised. Its not promoted.
It is, however, the end of the Game Theory.
The thing to note that people tend to overlook is that vote fraud is innately asymmetrical in the US. The "Blue Strongholds" are all the major population centers - they're densely packed.
"One person committing felonies" in Seattle WA's counting of King County's votes, can have a far, far larger impact than "One person committing felonies" in Ferry County WA (Accurate population is precisely, seven and a half or so.) This makes tit-for-tat vote fraud not the right model.
They tend to hilight and prosecute the "Spouse voted for dead spouse" type of rural "vote fraud" precisely so they can hilight "Look, it's always the Rs!", while ignoring "No, we don't know where the 10,000 ballots in that bin came from, we assume they were just forgotten on election night ... no one to prosecute here" types of things. The laws themselves don't quite honestly cover "Things the election officials can do to eff things up beyond belief" without them flat-out confessing "I forgot it to cheat".
Wrote up a little more on what game-theory or "minimizing needed felons" does with the electoral collage and vote-by-mail, reposting below even as it's slightly at an angle to your main point.
QUOTE VOTE MAIL
Kayleigh McEnany
Acknowledge cheating exists. I'm not claiming widespread. I am claiming Thou shalt defend Texas Recent Pennsylvania
The question to answer is: "How many people have to conspire to totally subvert things?" Not "How many individual votes are fraudulent" Think industrial scale cheating. Think how do you defend against industrial scale cheating.
Pretend we're in a state, Trumpland.
100 precincts. Two major parties. 1000 voters at each precinct. Each precinct gets a manager, I'll call them a lieutenant, and there's two observers. Everyone votes however they vote. At precinct Alpha, 673 paper ballots end up in a pile. Both observers separately write "I saw 673 ballots" everyone watches closely. "I saw 300 votes for Trump, 299 for OrangeCheeto." There's generally two other lines of "Auditing". Someone's counting signatures. Someone's counting "How many ballots did we actually hand out." and "How many spoiled ballots were handed back as spoiled". These numbers actually never line the eff up, but they're close enough no one makes a stink.
How many people need to be involved in a conspiracy in this precinct for systematic vote fraud on the counting side ? Well, I get "Five" - one of whom might have to be from the opposing party . Three is pretty much a minimum, but they have to make sure any oddities line up with the other "independent" routes of auditing.
But pretend we've got five people playing games in a precinct. Well. How can we play games if "we" control a precinct? There's 330 ballots totally blank, and we have the register of voters, how many do we feel we can add? Add 10% more "voter enthusiasm"? Something like 100 ballots to simply "stuff". Stuffing like that - still the five minimum, and anyone else that the "fill in the circles" is handed off to. But stick to 'five probably.'
How can we game the entire system here? What if ... what if I re-arrange the map such that the "Red" precincts and the "Blue" precincts have disparate raw numbers. Every precinct that votes red split in two, every precinct that votes Blue (and might get to cheat) doubles in numbers.
Red precincts now are 500 voters. And ... if they cheat, they can only "find" 50 or so votes easily. But ... a Blue Precinct now has 2000 voters, and the easiest "Just stuff" cheating can be 200-per-five-felonies. But... we really don't want to be caught ... how to convince people we take this super-serious? How about we... investigate the tiny precincts to death. "Look! Voted for his dead wife! And ... that's all we could find!"
How tilted does 200-per-corrupted precinct manage? Oh? Halve-and-double again? For "Efficiency?"
"Oh, yeah, fine, whatever. But you didn't address 'Absentee Ballots' or 'Provisional Ballots' "
Yeah. They're nominally three separate sets of accounting trails, and each is separately "policed" - meaning now you need to have fifteen people (ish) involved.
2004 Washington State. Something like a 162 vote race (after the finding ballots, recount, etc) for Governor. Giant lawsuit, televised. Proved in court more than 3000 feloniously cast ballots via the "regular" cheating - people faking IDs etc. Had some of these "Observers" and "Auditors" under oath. If I called them 'lax', that would be generous. One of the auditors explained her job as "I wait for the final paper vote count, add the number of spoiled ballots in front of me, and put that into the box labeled 'total votes handed out' " Hint: That's not her job. She's basically subverting her entire job - under oath. Asked things like "So, how many ballots were printed, and how many sealed packets of ballots remain" and this sort of question, she's clearly "Why are you even asking, you misunderstand - I just subtract five(spoiled ballot count), that's my $127,000/year job"
"Somehow" the Judge's ruling is "Even though there's 3000 felonious ballots, I don't know how they were voted, I don't have the authority for a re-vote, the vote stands with a 162 vote margin."
3000 known felonious votes , Five people charged on five counts of 'vote fraud' ... all Republicans-that-voted-for-dead-wife (so ... one ballot felonies). None of the elections officials even got demoted.
Before the next election, Washington State switched to "All Mail Voting". Every little security feature carefully spelled out in the old method basically wiped. The same two people ran for governor four years later - 200,000 vote difference.
Last time I paid strict attention, here was the arrangements. Remember to think "I'm looking to drive a truck through loopholes"
100% "By Mail via USPS", except for the ballot drop boxes, the county offices, and the major homeless shelters.
Ballot must be postmarked by election day. Except. Well. All the ballots from drop boxes etc.
Signature must match!!! Except...
Precinct, Printed name, barcode, and signature all on outside of return ballot. Stated reason: "For sorting"
USPS offers pre-sorting - enormous purpose-built programmable machines designed to ... sort on things like "Name on the outside of the envelope" and fill bins with them. This means you can have "Sealed at the facility" bags/bins of just "Precinct Alpha" or wherever. No election observers at Postal facility
So... someone nefarious looking at this. Hum. If I had a list of people. (cough)DNC Donor list(cough). I could "just" ... tell the post office that this list of people is in "Precinct Alpha-1" and this group of people is in "Precinct-2". Does anyone at the USPS need to know or care? Or, conversely, it could be at the USPS. Regardless, there's still no crime to track yet. All I've done is made a bag of "Probably Democratic Precinct Alpha People" and a bag of "Probably Republican Precinct Alpha People".
"Oops" I forgot one bag. Or that bag went through the postmarking machine "one day late!" Or one bag has the envelopes "re-stuffed" carefully.
Once someone has started playing games with "Names on the outside" (and the barcode - the envelopes have plenty of information in the barcodes!) then the number of people needed to conspire goes ... down.