range with L levels chew up L slots? - other ideas by Lomax & me It is actually possible to do range with L levels on plurality voting machines with only chewing up log[base2](L) slots per candidate, not L.
This is a huge improvement: L=512 becomes 9. Unfortunately, it requires the voters to think in binary rather than decimal, and that is probably unacceptable. (Basically, this is Lomax's "2^N possible combinations" idea, but done more clearly, kind of - the levers for each candidate have weights 1,2,4,8,16,...) In fact, this was my original idea for running range on plurality machines which I invented years ago but dismissed as probably unacceptable in real life. So then I just stewed for a few years uselessly,... But then Jan Kok invented a way to do it with decimal and chew-ratio L not logL, and Kok's plan seemed to me highly acceptable in real life since it was highly human-compatible and intuitive for the voter. Kok's is the scheme described on the CRV web page for running range elections on plurality machines. wds ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
