[EM] Rob Brown's "repair" of range voting

[Warren Smith]

>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.

--WDS replies:
your so-called fix causes range voting no longer to obey "favorite betrayal criterion"
which was one of range's biggest virtues. Indeed with strategic voters this becomes effectvely the "vote for and against"
system.  That is nowhere near as good a voting system for numerous reasons.


If you insist on this sort of fix, then what you would want would be
a renormalization via a 1D linear transofrmation intended to cause
the max score to be 100 and the min score to become 0, among the
scores the voter offers.

My feeling is this "fixed fix" is worse than unrepaired range voting
since 
  * more complicated
  * no longer will work with today's voting machines
  * prevents voters who intentionally want to downweight their vote, from doing so

But it does have some adherents.