> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [EM] Is range voting the panacea we need? > To: election-methods-electorama.com@electorama.com > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > > Will someone on the list who has studied range voting and compared it to > Condorcet, approval, and other methods please comment on Doug Greene's > paper? He appears to be saying that range voting is superior to all other > single > winner methods. Are there good arguments against this conclusion? Does range > voting have serious flaws? If so, could someone briefly summarize them? > Thanks, > Ralph Suter
--Reply: I am one of Greene's coauthors. There are senses in which range voting is superior, perhaps not to all, but certainly to all the common, single-winner voting methods. To learn about that, see my 2000 "range voting" paper and associated material at http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html #56. The senses of superiority are both theoretical, and experimental via computer simulations of millions of elections. I personally find the computer evidence more convincing than theoretical reasoning. Specifically, computer shows range voting has smaller "Bayesian regret" than all other voting methods I tried, robustly across a very large number of different scenarios, different numbers of voters, numbers of candidates, honesty/strategy behavior of voters, ignorance/knowledge of voters, different "utility generators", etc. Bayesian regret is argued to be clearly the uniquely best statistical yardstick for measuring single winner voting system quality. Warning: this 2000 paper is not perfect and I am planning on revising it, including some rewrites and fixes of the theoretical parts and updating the computer study to include even more voting systems, including many discussed on "election-methods". (If anybody wants to help, let me know...) I have in fact already partially done that and so far the conclusion of range's superiority has not altered. The present 2004 paper by Smith, Quintal and Greene is about a real-world study involving human voters. It learned some real-world lessons about range and approval and other voting and is recommedned reading as a sanity check for those of you who may be getting a bit too theoretical. -- Warren D. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info