[EM] Re: Is range voting the panacea we need?

[Chris Benham]

Ralph Suter wrote (Wed.Dec.15):

>Will someone on the list who has studied range voting and compared it to 
>Condorcet, approval, and other methods please comment on Doug Greene's paper? He 
>appears to be saying that range voting is superior to all other single winner 
>methods. Are there good arguments against this conclusion? Does range voting 
>have serious flaws? If so, could someone briefly summarize them?
>
CB: Range Voting is fine if  all one cares about is  "minimizing 
Bayesian regret"  (Warren D. Smith, one of  the paper's
authors)  or  meeting the  "Favourite Betrayal Criterion" (i.e. never 
having a strategic incentive to Compromise).
To cheerfully assert, as W.D. Smith does, that  "minimizing Bayesian 
regret" trumps majority rule  is  tantamount to saying
that more emotional voters should have more power than less emotional 
voters, which in my view is nonsensical and unfair.

One of  the aims of a voting method should be to minimize the advantage 
well informed strategists have over sincere voters.
Under Range Voting, well informed strategists will have much more clout 
than naive sincere voters.
To me, it is axiomatic that a single-winner voting method should, with 
sincere voting, reduce to FPP when there are only two
candidates. RV doesn't.
No voting method is invulnerable to informed strategy, but meeting No 
Zero-Information Strategy is very easy to meet, so
why not at least achieve that?  RV doesn't.

The paper Ralph refers to, by Smith, Quintal and Greene is paper 82 at

On page 11, they  propose what  I believe is a nutty idea on how to 
handle blank entries.
"So we recommend allowing blank entries, and averaging each candidate's 
non-blank entries to compute their final score."
They specify that  making all the blanks 0s (the lowest possible score) 
is  "inferior".

That means that if  all the voters except one are sincere, and the 
sincere voters all ignore some candidate that they know
nothing about, and also give out no maximum scores; and the single other 
voter gives the unknown candidate a maximum score;
then the unknown candidate will be elected, with one vote!

I dislike methods that pose any sort of problem for voters who simply 
want to vote their full  sincere ranking. Approval is
horrible in this respect:  voters must agonize on where to place their 
approval cutoff.  Range Voting with many more
available slots than  candidates also can pose a problem: voters must 
agonize on exactly how many points to give each
candidate, in the knowledge that any point could be decisive (which is 
not he case in  "Approval Margins", the method I
like that uses that type of ballot.)

Mike Ossipoff  (Thu.Dec.30)  speaks up for 3-slot CR as being more 
saleable and  appealing to voters than Approval,
and more proposable than  high-intensity CR  or  unrestricted ranking 
methods because of  the limitations of  current
voting equipment.
That is fine, but is  3-slot CR the best  3-slot method?  I say 
definitely not!  In my humble opinion the best 3-slot method
is 3-slot  Schwartz // Disapproval.  
(I also consider my "Majority Approval Runoff"  3-slot idea to be far 
superior  to 3-slot CR.)


Chris Benham

     


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