[EM] similar alternative to ratings-rankings ballot

[James Green-Armytage]

	In my recently-proposed weighted pairwise method, voters are asked to
rate candidates on a cardinal scale, e.g. 1-100. The strength of a voters
preference of one candidate over another is then simply measured by
subtracting the lower rating from the higher rating. Voters are
specifically limited in terms of the *sum* of their ratings gaps. That is,
the gaps will add up to a number that is equal to or less than 100. 
	There is an alternative to this which I haven't mentioned. That is,
limiting voters in terms of the size of individual gaps, rather than the
sum of the gaps. For example, let's say that my sincere rankings are
A>B>C>D>E. Using this ballot, if the gap-size limit was 10, I could vote 
A >0> B >2> C >8> D >10> E
	(The >n> symbols are intended to indicate that the expressed strength of
a particular preference is n.)
	How would my method count this? Well, if I used the same counting system
as before, the A>C gap would be worth 0+2 = 2, the A>E gap would be worth
0+2+8+10 = 20, the C>D gap would be worth 8, and so on. The problem with
this way of counting is that it would give me an incentive to rank a whole
lot of weird irrelevant candidates somewhere in between A and E to max out
the total ratings gap between them. So yeah, I DON'T think that it should
be counted this way.
	Maybe the best way would be to define the preference strength by the
largest gap between the two candidates. So, the A>C gap would be worth 2,
the A>E gap would be worth 10, and the C>D gap would be worth 8.
	I guess you could consider this to be an alternate version of my
proposal. I don't really know how good a system this would be in
comparison, but I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on the
matter.
	Basically, compared with normal winning votes, this gives voters the
ability to reduce the strength of a preference. It differs from my
original proposal in that reducing the strength of one preference does not
open an additional opportunity to increase the strength of other
preferences. 

best,
James