> Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2005 5:28 AM > 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.
So you think that just because I feel more strongly than you do in my liking for A and my dislike for B, just because I shout about it more loudly than you do, and just because I mark my ballot paper with bigger numbers than you do, my view of A and B should have more effect on the outcome than your view? If we are going to weight the effect of our respective contributions to determining the outcome on nothing more than how strongly we say we feel about the respective merits of the candidates, we really will open a Pandora's box. I might say that the views of voters who have a PhD in mathematics should be given 1000 times more weight than the views of voters who do not have such a qualification. That seems as a good a criterion for weighting the votes as how strongly we say we feel about our preferences. Others might take a rather different view on PhDs in mathematics! All such weightings will land us on a slippery slope to chaos. I have no problem with different voters expressing their preferences with different weightings: for example, for candidates A, B & C: voter1: 1, 2, 3; voter2: 1, 99, 100; voter3: 1, 999, 1000. The voting system can take these different weightings into account in "allocating" each voter's vote, but each voter must make the same contribution to determining the outcome as every other voter, no more and no less. If that doesn't fit with social choice theory - tough! James Gilmour ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
