[EM] Range voting is just a Borda count with a bunch of throwaway candidates

[Scott Ritchie]

On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 07:39 -0600, Adam Tarr wrote:
> Scott,
> 
> That would only be true if:
> 
> a)  The number of throwaway candidates was EXTREMELY large, so the
> difference in Borda between a first and second place vote was
> negligible, and
> 

Only if you want to give identical ranges to a few candidates other than
0.  I could be mistaken, but I believe that this is relatively uncommon
among range voters - there's usually some use of the range.

> b)  The "throwaway" candidates could in fact be depended on to be
> disqualified independently of the election process.  Otherwise, in a
> Borda vote one of them could win.
> 

We can depend on this, however, if we allow a large number of write-ins.

> Since these two things are generally not true, Range and Borda are not
> generally equivalent.
> 

I didn't mean to imply they were.  I meant to imply that Range (without
equal ratings) was generally equivalent to Borda with a bunch of
throwaways ;)  It does get you thinking a bit, however.

-Scott

> -Adam
> 
> On 8/19/05, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> > Title more or less says it.  Imagine we have range voting from 1 to 20,
> > with 9 candidates.  Then imagine we have a simple Borda count with 20
> > candidates, 11 of which we can presume are trash - joke write-ins, dead
> > candidates, disqualified people, hopeless losers, whatever.  The end
> > results are the same, including all the nasty stuff we complain about
> > Borda counts.
> > 
> > -Scott
> > 
> > 
> > 
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