[EM] Is range voting the panacea we need?

[Kevin Venzke]

Ralph,

 --- RLSuter at aol.com a écrit : 
> Will someone on the list who has studied range voting and compared it to 
> Condorcet, approval, and other methods please comment on Doug Greene's paper? He 
> appears to be saying that range voting is superior to all other single winner 
> methods. Are there good arguments against this conclusion? Does range voting 
> have serious flaws? If so, could someone briefly summarize them?

The paper (#82) doesn't seem to make an argument that range voting is
superior to other methods, except arguably to Approval.

I suggest reading another paper, #76, "Candidate incentives under different 
voting systems, and the self-reinforcing deterioration of US democracy." In
my opinion, this paper paints a picture of approval voting that borders on
hilarious.

Here is my interpretation of pages 13-16. The author argues that under FPP,
three candidates have incentive to move to positions (in 1D policy space)
such that they divide the electorate into quarters. The center candidate
will always lose.

I don't believe the author explains why he retains these candidate 
placements when changing the method being discussed to Approval. But
these candidates do remain in the same positions, and the author seems
to assume that a voter will approve his second-favorite half of the time.
(I don't think there is a concept of utility here.)

Then the author shows that (with these assumptions) each of the three
candidates will receive exactly the same number of votes. Quote:

"...then this is a 1:1:1 tie and the winner is not predetermined by the
forces of nature, i.e., amazingly, *voters really will get a genuine
3-way choice*."

Not only is a 3-way tie apparently the same as a real choice for the
voters, but it also means that three parties can coexist stably. This
is the "Main Result" in a box on page 16:

"8. Non-Duverger non-convergence law for Strategic range voters: With
strategic range (and hence also approval) voters, we expect that Duverger's
first law will *not* hold - three parties should be able to stably coexist -
and it will not be the case that a moderate (or flanker) will reliably
win a contest between 3 discernibly different candidates, so that 3 parties
will not have any great incentive to appear identical so that the law of
convergence similarly will *not* hold."

You can find this article (#76) yourself at
http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html

Kevin Venzke


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