[EM] What if the 2004 US presidential election had been held using Range or Approval voting?

[Doug Greene]

The long-awaited results of the Nov. 2004 range-voting presidential
pseudo-election are now available.   Paper also includes an
approval-voting pseudo-election and some other things!  Packed with data
from the real world!

   http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html    go to #82.

Study conducted by WD Smith, JN Quintal, and DS Greene. 
Comments/suggestions welcomed.

Important lessons learned include the following:

1. Range voting should be carried out with a range at least as large as
[0,20] (assuming integer votes) and perhaps as large as [0,99999].  The
choice [0,99] is superior to [0,100].

2. For either range or approval voting, voters should be given the option of
leaving a candidate's numerical vote *blank*, and the total score of each
candidate should then be got by *averaging* his non-blank numerical votes.

3. Both plurality and approval voting greatly distort election results (by
comparison with range voting), by artificially shrinking the final scores of
all candidates besides the top two (or in the case of approval, besides the
top three).  We're talking one or more orders of magnitude shrinkage.

4. Present-day voters in the USA, if given the choice between plurality and
range (or approval) voting, and given 1 minute to think about it, will
choose to stay with the inferior plurality system.  (They may be more biased
against range than approval, but this is not clear.) This proves that
considerable media attention and voter education would be required to get
range or approval voting enacted.
People's main stated reason for disdaining range voting is its perceived
complexity, so all voting systems more complicated than range voting are
*definitely* expected to be unwanted.

5. At least during initial years, about 80% of approval voters will vote
plurality-style.
This has successfully been used as ammunition by those opposed to approval
voting, to return to the plurality system.  But only about 20% of range
voters will choose to vote plurality style, making the analogous ammunition
unavailable for use against range voting.

6. For psychological reasons, range voters unexpectedly exhibit much more
honesty and much less strategy than plurality voters.

7. (The "SQG law"?) Respondents to polls in plurality-voting democracies
usually *lie* in such a way as to exaggerate perceived support for
third-party candidates.