At 02:01 PM 12/1/2005, James Gilmour wrote: >What I had in mind was if I vote 1, 2, 3, 4 (1 = most preferred, the >one I want to see win) for candidates A, B, C, D, >and you vote 100, 99, 2, 1 (1 = most preferred) for the same four >candidates, it would be fundamentally undemocratic if >your vote counted for more in determining the result just because >you expressed your preferences more strongly that I >did.
Why? Such a voting method leaves the decision of how strongly to express a preference to the voter. Let's suppose this is Range voting (that was not stated, but it is somewhat implied by the issue raised). The votes would, in range, generally not be expressed in the way stated. Range is *not* a preference-ordered system, though one can derive presumed preferences from it. In a Range system, ideally the voter is expressing utilities. I think it could be shown that the ideal strategy for Range would be to vote the most-preferred candidate as the maximum rating, for lowering that rating below that would simply dilute the vote, as stated. In a Range system, votes of 1,2,3,4 would be quite weird. Generally, Range implementations I've seen have the highest numerical rating being the most preferred. Ratings (Range votes) have been confused with preferences (used in Condorcet methods), not just in how they would be analyzed but in how they would be collected as well. To make sense of your votes in Range, I'd have to invert them. So you vote 4,3,2,1 for A,B,C,D, indicating that you prefer A most of all. The other voter votes 1,2,99,100, indicating a preference for D. You complain that the other voter's votes weigh more heavily. Well, yes, they certainly do. Why in the world, it would be asked, if you preferred A, did you only vote 4 for A instead of 100? In Range100, a 4 is not how one would indicate a candidate considered qualified, it would be a candidate just short of (pick your favorite political bugaboo). As I've indicated, some Range advocates propose normalizing Range Votes, but it is possible that good ballot design would make that unnecessary; and an argument against this is that voters should be *permitted* to express weak preferences. And if your preferences *are* weak, why should they be given great weight? Yes, some voters will exaggerate, they will indicate drastic differences when they really don't have that opinion. But Range produces, I think, the maximum utility for voters if they vote their sincere preferences. If they don't, they, quite likely, only injure their effect on the election outcome. For example, if you would honestly rate Nader 100, Gore 70, Bush 30, but you exaggerate to Nader 100, Gore 0, Bush 0, then you have done the most you can do to elect Nader, but you have effectively abstained from the contest between Gore and Bush. You have tossed away your chance to affect the election outcome. Range is a method where there is no incentive not to rate your preferred candidate with the maximum rating. You are then essentially casting one full vote for that candidate (A range vote is really vote/maximum possible vote). If you want to, you can vote strategically with the rest of the candidates, for example, one might vote Nader 100, Gore 100, Bush 0. This is essentially Approval voting (Approval is Range2). I've proposed a variant on Approval, it is essentially a Condorcet method with only three ranks, called, perhaps, Preferred, Approved, Rejected. In one implementation, the Preferred and Approved votes are counted identically, so the election method is simply Approval, but the voter has been allowed to express a preference, which could be used, for example, to determine campaign finance allocations (thus solving one potential problem of Approval). In a more complex implementation, but still far simpler than full ranked Condorcet, the Preferred and Approval votes would be counted identically in all pairwise elections other than the ones involving a Preferred and an Approved candidate, in which case Preferred votes would count as a vote for the Preferred candidate and against the merely Approved candidate. This is really truncated Condorcet. >I can understand that there might well be some difference in the >social utility assessments of our preferences against >the outcome, but the issue here is democratic representation and >"one person, one vote" surely comes above all else. Your example was pretty confused, and it made it look like one person had, say, 100 votes, while the other had 4 votes. But, in fact, both persons had one vote. One of them used the full vote, and the other *elected* not to do so, but only used .025 vote. That was the voter's choice. There is a lot of misinterpretation of "one person, one vote" out there.... >Once you depart from that (no matter what your opinion of the other >electors!), you are on a very slippery slope indeed. "One person, one vote" was a slogan coined in an environment where literally only one vote could be cast. I.e., not only not Approval, but also not IRV, Condorcet, none of that. The standard one-vote, winner-take-all system actually deprives many voters (sometimes *most* voters) of *any* vote. One of the demonstrations that Approval, for example, is only a one-person, one-vote system is that the only *real* vote is one which chooses a winner. In Approval, either one has voted for the winner, in which case one has cast one effective vote, or one has not, in case one has cast *no* effective vote. In no case will more than one vote be other than moot (for purposes of determining a winner, there are other uses for votes). As to any of these other votes, if the voter had not cast them, the election outcome would not change. But this brings up a point: in general, if a voter has not voted for a winner, the election outcome would not have changed had the voter not voted at all. Sometimes when I point this out, the objection is made that this is crazy, for there *must* be winners and losers. Yes, an election will have winners and losers, but it is not at all difficult to design an election system, if we are talking about representation, where *every* vote actually counts, at least potentially, and quite possible nearly always. This is Asset voting, where the secret ballot assigns votes to "candidates" who are really electors. While this method can be used for single-winner elections, it is in multiwinner, proportional representation elections that Asset would function to maximum effect. A candidate who receives the quota is elected (or can choose a winner without restriction), and any excess votes can be assigned to a different candidate or candidates. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info