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

[Bart Ingles]

Chris Benham wrote:
> Ok, suppose there are two candidates  and three voters, and the voting 
> method is Range Voting
> using the scale 0-100. All three voters are completely sincere.
> 
> Voters 1 and 2  both prefer candidate A to candidate B, but not by much 
> and they are not very impressed by either. They
> vote  A27, B25.   Voter 3, on the other hand,  is infatuated  with B and 
> thinks that A is by comparison terrible, so votes
> A2, B98.  This is how W.D Smith measures "regret" in his simulations.

Except that Smith apparently claims that the voter utilities used in 
calculating Bayesian regret should be any real numbers (although that is 
not what I was able to glean from his source code.)  It makes no sense 
to me, but the exchange is on the yahoo group for approval voting, a 
couple of months back-- maybe someone can show me where I misinterpreted 
his messages.

I wonder what a reasonable distribution of voter utilities would be if 
the allowable utilities can be any real number?  A linear distribution 
would be kind of hard to do, especially if you don't inadvertently use 
your compiler's floating point limits as minimum and maximum bounds.

Bart