[EM] Introduction (cont.)

[Douglas Greene]

I currently tend to favor AV, for all the reasons you're familiar
with.  Besides the ones I've seen mentioned, it's also possible in
some cases to implement it with no changes in statute.

But I was surprised to see that no one had brought up range voting.  I
was first tipped off to this system through a post from (of all
people) the CVD's Rob Richie.

Warren D. Smith of the NEC Research Institute modeled 120 or so voting
systems with both sincere and strategic voters.  He found that range
voting produced the least Bayesian regret as compared to all the other
systems.  His work is available at:

http://www.neci.nec.com/homepages/wds/works.html  Scroll down to
number 56, and it's all there.

In brief:

"In this system, you provide a k-tuple of real numbers,
each in some fixed range (Smith uses -1 to 1, but 0-1
and 0-10 are other popular choices; all are equivalent)
as your "vote" in a k-candidate election.

For simplicity, let us, like Olympic figure skating judges,
use the range 0-10. Consider a 4-way election
with candidates (Buchanan, Bush, Gore, Nader).
You could provide, as your vote, the 4-tuple
(0, 2, 9, 10). All the vote-tuples are then added up,
and the winner is the candidate with the largest
total. For example, if this vote and also somebody else's vote
(6, 10, 0, 8) were added, we would get
(6, 12, 9, 18). The largest total would be 18
so (if these were the only two voters),
Nader would be the winner."

I'm delighted I found this list.  It's heartening to know that there
are others out there who haven't bought into the CVD line.

Doug