[EM] Voting Systems Study of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota

[Florian Lengyel]

The assumption that the mathematical analysis of voting systems has
nothing to do with actual voting systems is mistaken; there seems to
be a level of cognitive resolution below which inferior systems (such
as IRV) will appear "good" because the mathematical evidence is
incomprehensible. They also mistakenly assert that
IRV eliminates the spoiler problem.

Warren D. Smith has proposed (on the approval voting list) range
voting (RV), which is the continuous analog of approval voting (or
cardinal voting); a voter can vote any number in the unit interval for
each candidate. A common criticism of approval voting, which occurs in
the LWV article--that approvals all have the same intensity (equal to
one)--is eliminated in range voting. However, it is more involved to
implement than approval voting.

Smith shows that IRV will lead to a 2-party duopoly over time (his is
expected), whereas RV will not. Smith defines a decision theoretic
notion called Bayesian regret and has computer simulations which show
that range voting minimizes the average Bayesian regret over all
systems compared (including plurality, IRV, approval voting...). One
would like to see statements and proofs of the RV-analogues of
theorems about approval voting that have appeared in the literature,
though certain nice properties are immediate (monotonicity,
summability).

-FL


On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 06:57:09 -0400, James Green-Armytage
<jarmyta at antioch-college.edu> wrote:
> 
> >they don't explicitly write that they recommend IRV, but
> >the study is written in such a manner that a naive reader
> >will necessarily get to the conclusion that IRV was the
> >best method.
> 
>        I agree with Markus's assertion that the LWV analysis is poorly done, and
> poorly done in a way which usually favors IRV. I agree with many of
> Markus's criticisms, especially their slipshod analysis of vulnerability
> to strategy. Just in case anyone is interested, they do say one nice thing
> about Condorcet, that is:
> 
> "even champions of other systems acknowledge that such a Condorcet winner
> is more truly representative of the will of the majority and
> therefore more 'democratic.' "
> 
>        But on the whole, yes, they tread too softly on IRV. One other thing I
> noticed is that their research is a bit erratic. They cite several,
> several pages on the fairvote site, and quite a few pages on Mike
> Ossipoff's site, but they didn't seem to read any of the other sites which
> talk about Condorcet's method... and there are quite a few good ones.
>        By the way, I also think that they take the Borda count too seriously...
> 
> James
> 
> 
> 
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