Exaggerated opinions

[David Marsay]

A response to: 

> From:          Saari <Saari at aol.com>
> Date:          Sat, 18 Apr 1998 21:31:04 EDT
> Subject:       Exaggerated opinions

Mike disagrees with:

> << What do you mean with "acceptable" or "violently opposed". To my opinion,
>  you should always remember, that every voting method, that uses absolute
>  preferences, is vulnerable to exaggeration. >>

I for one would always give my preferred option the highest rating 
even if I thought that the issue affected some other voters more.
It seems to me that voters like me will affect the outcome more than 
those who take account of their strength of preference.

> Example#2.  This is a method I'm exploring right now.  Same system as above,
> but suppose that double-votes, triple-votes, etc. are also allowed.  But there
> is a cost.  A double-vote costs $1 for each instance.  A triple-vote costs
> $10.  A quadruple-vote costs $100.  All money collected goes into a common
> pool which is routinely split evenly among all of the participants.

I hope we are not talking real money here! I would not vote for such 
a scheme.

My view is that we might have ballots with terms like 'strongly 
support', 'weakly support', ... that appear to describe absolute 
ratings, but that we should treat them as relative preferences. 
If everyone is like me then it makes no difference. It prevents 
honest voters from being disadvantaged. An alternative would be to 
treat them as absolute ratings but to suggest to voters that they 
should exaggerate their ratings, unless they really don't mind their 
votes being relatively ineffective.

It seems to me there ought to be some reasonable scheme that could be 
used instead of first-past-the-post, but it might need to be 
described differently to attract the support of different 
electorates. I would use Condorcet to derive a median ranking.

Cheers.
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Sorry folks, but apparently I have to do this. :-(
The views expressed above are entirely those of the writer
and do not represent the views, policy or understanding of
any other person or official body.