[EM] 3-level voting

[Elisabeth Varin/Stephane Rouillon]

Why I do not like 3-level voting.

First from an informatician point of view, there is no reason to
artificially restrain the ranking input to 3-level. Why not let
the voter use as many levels (s)he wishes. It could be one, two, three
or more as fits. So a (possibly truncated) preferential ballot is ideal.
It is used in Ireland, so I do not think the rest of the planet is too
stupid to use it. If voting means expressing my preferences, let
me express all those I can and I want...

MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:

> There's been discussion here about 3-level points systems, and so
> I'm sure that Y/N has been discussed here, and that I'm probably
> repeating things already said.
>
> An advantage of Approval over CR is that Approval doesn't require a
> ballot different from the existing one. An advantage of CR over
> Approval is that CR is familiar to people, whereas some mistakenly
> feel that Approval violates 1-person-1-vote.

I am one of these persons. It is OBVIOUS that approval gives more power to
voters who like several candidates. It favours a concensual voter (who would
accept to rally with other candidates) over a one-minded voter. So approval
voting forces a voter to choose between approving or not his (her) second
preference and next without benefiting from other voter preferences
information. Rallying methods force you to make the same choice, but at the
round it occurs, the decision is more guided because some candidates have
already been identified as loosers. Despite this, I do not think approval is
unfair to voters. Voters have an equal opportunity. They are just encouraged
to become multiple-approving voters. Thus approval IS UNFAIR to candidates.
Even a Condorcet Winner can loose with approval because the winner can be
the 7th choice of all voters, the last acceptable candidate.
Finally an other reason that proves approval does not give the same power to
every voter is that the candidates final weights do not represent
a proportional result with an equal weight for each voter. This is a basic
monotonicity feature.

> But someone wrote to me suggesting a method that has both of those
> advantages: Yes/No voting:
>
> Each voter may give a candidate "Yes", "No", or nothing. A candidate's
> No votes are subtracted from his Yes votes, and the result is his
> score. The candidate with highest score wins.
>
> That's equivalent to CR, with -1, 0, 1. Which is equivalent to
> 0, 1, 2 CR. Which of course is strategically equivalent to Approval.

I definitely disagree with Mike on this. Triplets cannot be strategically
equivalent to Approval. Again these methods do not ensure an equal weight to
every voters when some of them truncate their ranking, thus it violates the
1-person, 1-vote concept (1-"full vote").

> Every county already has balloting equipment that supports voting
> yes or no on a list of things. People are familar with it and won't
> call it a violation of 1-person-1-vote. Moreover, many people would
> very much like to give negative votes.

And it would really be the start for unrepresentation. An election is a
representation exercise, not an ultimate wrestling contest where only one
winner has to get out of the ring. Nobody should ever see its vote being
cancelled by somebody else. It is fundamental that proportions be respected.
A 5011 to 4999 win is VERY different than a 12-0 win. The first is almost a
tie, the second expresses a clear preference. When generalized to obtain a
fully proportional chamber, those results have to produce different results.
Do not destroy the information from the start! The very same logic is
applied to compare pairwise victories and it leads to relative margin as
being the fairest comparison criteria. A 54 republicans and 48 democrats
senate is not the same than a 6 republicans senate. Do not dismiss the
opposition, it counts. NO to negative votes.

Steph.

----
For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), 
please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em