On Jan 3, 2005, at 9:41 AM, Rob LeGrand wrote:
It has been claimed that Range Voting might be an easier sell than Approval as a voting reform, which could be true. And I understand that some Range advocates see the fact that many voters would vote sincerely as a good thing. But since strategic voters would have more power in a Range election and might be seen as "cheaters" by the sincere voters, I think there would likely be a public demand for restrictions on voting candidates at the extremes, turning Range into something more like Borda.
When I advised the Free State Project (www.freestateproject.org) on voting systems for their choose-the-state-to-move-to election, they initially wanted to use cumulative voting. I managed to convince them that cumulative reduces to plurality when voters are strategic, ...
I think it's been shown that the optimum strategy is not to vote-for-one (plurality) on a ratings ballot, but to vote max-rating for any choice above some threshold internal to you, and min-rating for the rest. Thus straight cumulative vote degenerates to Approval under strategy (not plurality).
but then they offered to add restrictions such as "you can't give more than half of your votes to any one candidate", which would make the system worse.
I think the answer is to tinker with the counting on the back end, not make limits on how a voter can vote. Systems like "Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings", or James Green-Armytage's ratings-based Condorcet cycle-break method solve the immediate shortcomings of straight cumulative vote, and still provide the satisfaction of an expressive ballot.
I believe restrictions for Range Voting such as "you can't give any two candidates the same rating" (when the number of allowed ratings is finite and fairly small) would be intuitively appealing to many voters who would like to vote sincerely and want to force others to do so.
Everyone wants to limit what someone else can do so that they can't cheat? Maybe it's just me but that sounds somehow socially cynical.
Approval Voting makes it obvious that it is natural and acceptable to vote at the extremes and so would offer no such temptation to tinker with the system.
How could Approval be tinkered with after adoption? Although I see it as unlikely, some voters might want to limit the number of allowed approvals. But allowing n approvals in a race would allow n + 1 parties to compete fairly in that race, which is still a strict improvement over plurality.
Hmm, recast Approval as not "some number of yes votes", because that violates some people's sense of one-person-one-vote, but instead "a yes/no vote per choice". I think that should cancel any desire to limit the number of yes votes; which is a degradation and not an improvement on Approval vote.
If you want to improve Approval, you're going to need a more expressive ballot, at which point you may as well just move to rankings or many-valued-ratings (as opposed to the two-valued-rating of Approval) ballots.
Brian Olson http://bolson.org/
---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
