[EM] Bees vote. They use range voting. 20 million years of Darwinian evolution says RV.

[Warren Smith]

To learn more about this fascinating story, see
   http://www.rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html

It took me a while to understand the bees' method.  At first I thought
it was kind of a hybrid of range voting, plurality voting, and negotiation.
But eventually it dawned on me, after reading Myerscough's paper, that
the latter two procedures really were mathematically essentially
equivalent to picking the candidate with the largest average,
i.e. "range voting with intentional blanks allowed."  The bees
are probably not capable of doing the necessary arithmetic and hence
have developed an ingenious totalling procedure which gets the right
answer (averaging & picking the max) but without actually doing any arithmetic.

The net result, I claim, is pretty much equivalent to the range voting 
procedure recommended on the CRV front page
    http://www.rangevoting.org/

Incredible!  (And talk about an ego-diminishing experience - scooped by 20 million years!
Well at least we know who invented range voting now!)

Bees have run about 1 TRILLION  elections, which dwarfs everything humans
have ever done, and also dwarfs whatever computer simulations can achieve
(at least, without heroic efforts - give me the US government's top supercomputer
for a solid century, and maybe I'll start to approach what the bees have accomplished)
so I think they should be taken seriously.

Warren D Smith