[EM] reply to Gilmour attack on range voting & social utility; CCd to RangeVoting

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:07 PM 12/2/2005, James Gilmour wrote:
>On this point we shall have to disagree.  Just because you express 
>your liking for A and your dislike for B more strongly than I do, 
>does not mean your vote should count for any more than mine, or than 
>anyone else's, when we are asked to choose between candidates A and 
>B to be our representative.  You may be more upset than I am when B 
>wins, but that does not give you any right for your vote to have a 
>greater effect than mine in determining the outcome.

Let me put it this way. If we have a true democracy, the form of 
government and its institutions are a matter of the consent of the 
people. Suppose a majority of people decide that, say, Range Voting 
is the best method, and it is a method which *allows* but does not 
require people to cast a weak vote (but stronger than what everyone 
agrees is allowed, an abstention).

In that case we could not say that allowing stronger expression to 
count more strongly was undemocratic, or could we?

Mr. Gilmour is appealing to "rights." What is the basis for these 
rights? And Mr. Gilmour is arguing *against* a right, not for one, 
since in a voting system where strength of preference affects the 
outcome, a voter does have the right to assert a strong preference or 
not. Mr. Gilmour would have voters *not* have such a right, by simply 
denying that no such right exists. But the voters have whatever 
rights the system establishes for them, and to the extent that the 
system is a democracy, the voters will have whatever rights the 
majority agrees belong to them.

(Note, please, that a system can be democratic with respect to its 
members and non-democratic with respect to others, over whom it may 
even exercise some form of tyranny.)

[Re Mr. Smith:]
>Please do not interpret this as my arguing for IRV over any other 
>single-winner voting system, but it is obvious from
>your comments that you do not understand the basic philosophy behind 
>such preferential voting systems.  The preferences
>after the first are contingency choices, to be brought into 
>operation only if needed.

The same is true of Range Votes, actually. It's easiest to see with 
Range2, i.e., Approval. If you vote for two candidates in approval, 
at most one of these votes actually counts. The other is moot; that 
is, the election outcome would not change if the vote were removed. 
Essentially, with Approval, both votes are "contingency votes."

The big flaw in IRV -- that does not exist with Condorcet methods -- 
is, of course, that IRV, as generally proposed, fails to use all the 
pairwise information from the ballots simultaneously. So if I happen 
to prefer A and B to C, but C to D, my C to D preference is neglected 
until both A and B have been eliminated. And this can cause D to win 
over C in spite of my preference. Condorcet methods avoid this 
problem by choosing the pairwise winner, if one exists.