Warren Smith wrote:
It seems to me that approval and range voting eliminate most of the
strategic opportunity in single winner elections and the marginal
improvement of other methods is fairly small. Can anyone point me to
analysis, preferably at a layman level, that contradicts or supports this
assertion?
Or, in succinct terms, what are the strategic flaws in approval or range
voting?
Thanks, Matthew Welland
--well... there is the whole rangevoting.org website...
my more-recent papers at
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html
discuss range voting including some ways it is provably better than every
rank-order voting system for either honest or strategic voters...
--but those are not exactly "succinct"...
OK Let me try:
1. Range for 100% honest voters behaves better than IRV, Borda,
Condorcet and it is pretty intuitively clear why -- strength of
preference info used, not discarded.
There is, of course, the flipside of that property. If one wants a
voting method where the majority wins, then Range won't work, simply
because a minority of strong opinions can outweigh a majority of weak
ones. You might argue that that is no bug at all (strong opinions
*should* outweigh weak ones), but for those for which Majority
compliance is a must-have, it should be mentioned - particularly since
that is supposed to be one aspect of the fairness of traditional democracy.
In that sense, moving to Range (and perhaps Approval - depends on how
you interpret it) is a more radical proposal than, for instance, moving
to Condorcet (which passes Majority).
(And now I wonder which election method that passes Majority has the
least Bayesian regret.)
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