Matthew, I'm not sure if it is quite at the layman level, but Prof. Nicloaus Tideman's recent book "Collective Decisions and Voting" has an analysis of vulnerability to strategic manipulation of virtually every single-winner voting method that has ever been proposed and concludes that Range Voting along with Borda and four other methods "have defects that are so serious as to disqualify them from consideration." (page 238). Range Voting advocates on this list dispute his definition of "resistance to strategy."
A somewhat more accessible (and available online for free) analysis of strategic vulnerability of various methods is in this doctoral paper by James Green-Armytage ("Strategic voting and Strategic Nomination: Comparing seven election methods"). He found that Range and Approval were just about the worst in terms of manipulability. http://econ.ucsb.edu/graduate/PhDResearch/electionstrategy10b.pdf Terry Bouricius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Welland" <m...@kiatoa.com> To: "Election Methods Mailing List" <election-meth...@electorama.com> Sent: Saturday, November 07, 2009 3:12 PM Subject: [EM] Anyone got a good analysis on limitations of approval andrange voting? 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, Matt -=- ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info