[EM] RE : Re: A few concluding points about SFC, CC, method choice, etc.

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 04:29 PM 2/15/2007, Kevin Venzke wrote:
>I would guess that most of our criteria *do* coincide with higher
>utility. All things being equal you couldn't expect that a method that
>fails majority favorite would produce higher utility.

I'm not sure what "all things being equal" means, particularly 
because Majority Favorite is clearly suboptimal in some 
not-too-uncommon scenarios, generally involving the majority having a 
small preference for a candidate, with the minority having a large 
preference *against* that candidate.

A Shi'a voter might not have a strong preference between two Shi'a 
candidates, one of them being the majority favorite. But a Sunni 
voter might have very strong feelings between them if one of them is 
clearly more fair toward the minority Sunnis.

(As an aside, considering the Shi'a the majority is almost an 
oxymoron. Practically by definition, Sunni means "majority," but, of 
course, it is a majority in the whole Muslim world (a strong one), 
just not in Iraq.)

Range will uncover this, and select based on overall utility, if 
voters vote sincerely. If they don't vote sincerely, results will 
vary, but they won't be *worse* than Majority Favorite.

The Majority cannot fail to elect its Favorite unless it allows 
another candidate some vote strength. If the Majority *strictly* 
prefers its Favorite, it will prevail in Approval. By "strict" I mean 
that it does not allow the expression of parity with another 
candidate. That is, a majority bullet-votes for its favorite. Only if 
some segment of that majority also approves another candidate can 
another win. Of course, with Approval, there is no way to determine 
from the votes if there was a violation of Majority Favorite; indeed, 
it seems more likely, in general, that the Approval winner *would* 
generally be the Majority Favorite.

>There are other issues besides utility of course... There's the question
>of what the public will accept and understand how to use, and there's
>all the questions of how to give the voter incentive to vote sincerely.

It appears from Warren's research, however limited it was, that 
voters are quite likely to vote sincerely unless you give them a good 
reason not to.

> > It's
> > *assumed*, very easily, that the majority choice is the optimum
> > winner -- and therefore it is desirable to satisfy the Majority
> > Criterion -- when this is certainly not clear enough to be reasonably
> > an axiom.
>
>I think it's actually clear that the majority favorite isn't necessarily
>the SU winner. I don't think it follows from this that it isn't desirable
>to satisfy MF. It depends on what alternatives you have.

The MF winner can be a disaster, compared to a Range winner, in some 
scenarios not too far from recent history. I don't see the reverse 
being likely at all. That is, Range is only likely to elect other 
than the MF when there is a *better* candidate.

(Unless you use the weird Rube Goldberg "quorum rule" that has been 
tacked onto Range in an attempt to implement a goal which seems noble 
in itself, that of making it easy to abstain from rating a candidate 
without hurting the candidate. But that goal is itself questionable, 
and introduces an entirely new kind of reform, and one which could 
cause a failure of a Range election, though the conditions are 
unclear to me. Has this contraption been tested?)

> > Any person or business which makes decisions failing to
> > consider the strength of preferences will soon run into trouble....
>
>An individual person has a great advantage in measuring preference
>strengths.

Certainly. However, businesses also need to make decisions based on 
input from many people. Range Voting is not uncommon in those 
situations. (Consider how many polls you've participated in where you 
were asked to rate something on a scale of 1 - 10.)