[EM] ignoring "strength of opinion"

[James Gilmour]

> Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2005 5:28 AM
> James Gilmour wrote:
> >What I had in mind was if I vote 1, 2, 3, 4 (1 = most preferred, the 
> >one I want to see win) for candidates A, B, C, D,
> >and you vote 100, 99, 2, 1 (1 = most preferred) for the same four 
> >candidates, it would be fundamentally undemocratic if
> >your vote counted for more in determining the result just because 
> >you expressed your preferences more strongly that I
> >did.
> 
> Why? Such a voting method leaves the decision of how strongly to 
> express a preference to the voter.

So you think that just because I feel more strongly than you do in my liking for A and my dislike for B, just because I
shout about it more loudly than you do, and just because I mark my ballot paper with bigger numbers than you do, my view
of A and B should have more effect on the outcome than your view?

If we are going to weight the effect of our respective contributions to determining the outcome on nothing more than how
strongly we say we feel about the respective merits of the candidates, we really will open a Pandora's box.  I might say
that the views of voters who have a PhD in mathematics should be given 1000 times more weight than the views of voters
who do not have such a qualification.  That seems as a good a criterion for weighting the votes as how strongly we say
we feel about our preferences.  Others might take a rather different view on PhDs in mathematics!  All such weightings
will land us on a slippery slope to chaos.

I have no problem with different voters expressing their preferences with different weightings: for example, for
candidates A, B & C:  voter1: 1, 2, 3;  voter2: 1, 99, 100;  voter3: 1, 999, 1000.  The voting system can take these
different weightings into account in "allocating" each voter's vote, but each voter must make the same contribution to
determining the outcome as every other voter, no more and no less.  If that doesn't fit with social choice theory -
tough!

James Gilmour