[EM] Ranked Preferences, Range

[Dave Ketchum]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 19:43:13 -0500 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
 > At 12:19 AM 10/31/2006, Dave Ketchum wrote:
 >
 >>This certainly DOES NOT earn a need for special assistance to such a voter.
 >>
 >>Whatever information may be available, if the voter does not know enough
 >
 >>from it to HAVE a personal preference, the obvious response is to not vote
 >
 >>- leaving to others establishment of a consensus.
 >>
 >>DWK
 >
Looking back, "a voter wants to vote for the consensus option,"

This voter WANTS to leave the decision to others, and I still see no
reason to complicate such a voter's life.
 >
 > Right. This kind of thinking is behind the proposal that blank votes
 > be excluded in determining average Range votes. It does make sense,
 > but, if this is done, then it is possible that a winner disapproved
 > by a majority of voters can win. Then a Rube Goldberg rule, the
 > so-called 25% rule, was proposed, which I think says that, to win, a
 > candidate must have been rated by 25% of the voters. I'd prefer more
 > direct ways of addressing the problem, possibly even involving a
 > runoff. It is clear to me that someone who is rated very highly by a
 > significant percentage of voters, but who is largely unrated,
 > deserves a serious shot at winning. But it is also clear that such a
 > person, even with 25% rating him or her, has not yet earned the
 > general approval of the electorate. A runoff of some kind would
 > resolve this. This Range winner would no longer be so little known.

Agreed that blanks should not complicate life - leave the deciding to
those ready to take part.  Suppose the nominating has successfully placed
only capable candidates on the ballot - then there is GOOD reason to leave
the voting to those who can see differences.

BTW - I will see such a list when voting for for Congress next week - the
Republicans HAVE NO candidate for my district.

But, blank is NOT disapproval - range has a way to express disapproval if
that is what the voter wants.

Thus, no need to invite Rube Goldberg in.

Plurality has need for runoffs - no reason to invite that complication in
when the method allows voters to express themselves reasonably completely.
 >
 > What the threshhold should be that triggers a runoff, I'm not yet
 > clear about. When there is a Condorcet winner if the Range ballots
 > are analyzed as if they were ranked ballots is another situation that
 > might call for a runoff. In this case, too, there would be a lack of
 > explicit public approval of the Range winner in the election. Good
 > chance the Range winner *is* the best, but that has not yet been 
demonstrated.
 >
 > With the insufficiently informed voter above, I would simply leave
 > the question of how to vote to the voter. There can be and should be
 > all kinds of resources to make becoming informed easy. This, indeed,
 > is part of the purpose of the FA/DP proposals, which are quite
 > independent of the methods being used in public elections. We can
 > expect that members of FA/DP political organizations who have named a
 > proxy, and who have made a reasonably decent choice in doing this,
 > will have good advice on how to vote. "Good" means that it is from
 > someone who is more informed, and who is trusted by the voter. They
 > may put as much or as little effort into confirming this as they choose....

Where's all these resources?  True that there are often lots of opinions,
but it is often not easy to sort them out as to quality.
 >
 > Requiring that everyone become fully informed would be bad system 
design....

Also not practical to do.  You CAN demand that they go thru the motions of
voting - and get a surplus of garbage out in response.
-- 
   davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
   Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
             Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
                   If you want peace, work for justice.