[EM] Fixing Range Voting

[rob brown]

Ok, I've made it pretty clear I am not a fan of Range Voting as it has been
presented.  However, I could see it being done in a way that is fair and
does not encourage people to inadvertedly do something that is counter to
their interests.

Let's say that votes can range from 0 to 10.  For simplicity of explanation,
I'm going to convert this to -5 to +5.  (it could still be 0 - 10 on the
ballot)

After voting, your vote is normalized such that the sum of the absolute
values of the votes will always be 5.

This way, if you want one candidate to get a "maximum impact" vote of 5 (or
-5), the rest will have to get a vote of 0.

If you want to specify a favorite as well as a "most disliked" candidate,
one could get a vote of -2.5, and the other a vote of 2.5.  (if you gave one
a 5 and one a -5, this is what it would get normalized to)

Or, you could give 3 candidates a 1 and 2 candidates a -1. (this is what
would happen if you gave 3 a 5 and 2 a -5).

If you gave one a 5 and one a -2, after normalization one would get a
3.57and one a -
1.43.

Unlike the way I have seen range voting described, this way would have to
average in a "zero" for those that you have no opinion on  (assuming you
vote at all on this particular candidate set).

To me this approach would solve the massive glaring "gamability" problem
with Range Voting, which is that everyone's best strategy would be to simply
give all candidates either a minimum or maximum score.

-rob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20051206/7a00b371/attachment-0002.htm>