[EM] minimizing voter despair

[LAYTON Craig]

>One of the reasons citizens don't vote is voter apathy born of despair:
>"What good will it do, none of the candidates have my interest in mind."
>
>A major objective of election reform is to  overcome this despair.

I most certainly agree.

>It seems to me that there might be a "tragedy of the commons" dilemma
>here.  The voters know that if they all stick to their agreement to vote
>their honest probabilities, the outcome for the group will be best, 

This is difficult.  Numerically representing your level of satisfaction from
a number of different outcomes might be "honest" from your point of view,
but without a standard that is followed by all of the voters, the honesty
doesn't mean anything.

Say there is a polity of sincere voters, who would not ever dream of voting
strategically.  This polity votes for their president using Approval Voting.
So far so good.  However, in our election for president out of ten possible
candidates, one group of voters vote for all those candidates that are
strongly liked (between one and four, becuase even this group has different
standards of what "strongly like" means), one group of voters vote for all
candidates that are reasonably acceptable (between three and seven), and one
group of voters vote for all candidates that are not strongly disliked
(between five and nine).  This does not include the voters that vote for
exactly half of the running candidates every time, or have invented some
other system of voting.  All these voters are voting sincerely, but because
of a lack of common standard, the results could get quite arbitrary.  The
problem is worse with 'higher resolution methods', where one can really only
be said to be voting sincerely if one casts their vote relative to the
preferences of other voters.

Say a voter is relatively unnaffected no matter which candidate gets in.  In
order for a higher res system to really work with sincere voting, this voter
is expected to know that other voters are more affected than him by the
choice of candidate, he should keep all of his scores / reported utility
outcomes on a similar level.  This is unrealistic, but more importantly,
undemocratic (as is our ideal society voting with approval), because
everyone's votes do not count the same - they are not equal.  While I'm not
one to jump up and down about how fantastic democracy is in its own right,
it would be safe to say that, as a general rule, it is useful to maintain
political equality amoung citizens, not least because we have no way of
safely evaluating the differences in utility outcomes between individuals,
so the best default is to assume that they're all the same (ie assume that a
person having their first choice elected is as utility positive as any other
person having their first choice elected).

Approval is an acceptable voting system because it minimises the inequality
of voters, especially given that the strategies available to the voters are
simple to understand, and balance out the inequality even more.  Higher
Resolution methods carry all of the disadvantages of approval, without any
of the mitigations.