[SAARI FAQ] - Intensity Voting

[New Democracy]

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Dear list members,

     At one time Saari talked of intensity voting(copy below). I have not
decided yet if I would favor intersity voting but I would like to submit my
suggestion for anyone to comment on.

     I suggest the following as an intensity voting method:

     You allow each voter to weigh their vote from a value of one to a
value of nineteen but they must not go over a 10.0000 running average based
on all votes in the past. If a voter has a current average of 10.0000 he
would be allowed to vote a ten or lower but not an eleven or more.

     The high intensity votes are balanced out by lower intensity votes.
Each voter will learn to bank some intensity for when they may need it in a
future vote.

Yours,

Donald Davison at http://www.mich.com/~donald

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Saari wrote:
I am also grappling with the meta-question of how to accurately "measure" the
intensity of the feelings of the voters.  For purposes of discussion, we
could posit that all voters have the same financial situation, then describe
situations where each given voter describes their strength of support or
opposition in terms of $$$.  But this only works in the abstract, not in real
life where different people have different meanings to the "value" of $10.
 And using this for a voting system has lots of problems, too.  But it might
be a valuable piece of the puzzle.

For instance, two voters might be one "Support" and the other "Opposed".  Yet
one might be a $10 opinion, whereas the other might be a $10,000 opinion.  If
the dollar amounts were a genuine reflection of "true" feelings, then going
with the $10,000 opinion would be best overall.  (This is assuming a
structure which creates true, not exaggerated, expressions of degree of
feeling.  This may seem impossible but I know of two systems today which have
this effect -"Second Place Auction" and "Median Voting".)

My "scale" of "TRIPLE-SUPPORT", "WILLING" ... is one attempt to represent
such gradations, but it is still too weak in my view.

All for now,
Mike S
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