[Election-Methods] [EM] RV comments

[Juho]

I think we have by now covered most of the stuff and are now to some  
extent repeating things. Let's try to cut that out.

On Aug 10, 2007, at 1:22 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> That all voters from one party would vote "sincerely" and all from  
> another party "approval style" is preposterous.

It is not a requirement that all would be "sincere" or "approval style".

>>  Range may however provide worse results than Approval if
>> there is a mixture of Approval like and sincere opinion like votes
>> (and those votes are not evenly spread among the candidates).
>
> Asserted, over and over, without any proof at all, or even  
> reasonable evidence. Apply the statement just made to the above  
> example. And define "worse" without using utility analysis. If you  
> can.

In any election/example, if your competitors use non-exaggerated  
votes and you use fully exaggerated votes, you have higher chances of  
winning.

Term "worse" refers to the Range promoters' use of the term when  
explaining why Range is better than other methods. Easy to define as  
sum of or average utilities but also other formulations are ok with me.

>>  50% D=100, R1=80, R2=70,  30% R1=100, R2=90, D=70,  20%
>> R1=100, R2=0, D=0. The "bad" Republican wins. In real life this is
>> however not likely to happen since probably the D and R1 supporters
>> will understand what's going on and will exaggerate too. Many R1
>> supporters might take one step back and give more points (maybe max)
>> to R2 too.
>
> For starters, any method can elect a "bad" candidate, if voters  
> don't use the method intelligently! The above example was, I think,  
> misstated, I'm modifying it here so that it makes sense.
>
>         D       R1      R2
> 50:     100     80      70
> 30:     70      100     90
> 20:     0       0       100
>         ---------------------
>         7100    7000    8200
>
> What is going on here? 80% of the voters don't care much about who  
> wins the election! And they vote that way. So the 20% who care --  
> Ron Paul supporters, of course -- vote as if they care, and they win.

I didn't assume anything on how much the voters want to win. I  
assumed only that some voted strategically and some gave their  
sincere opinion. It is possible to rate a candidate at 100 but not  
care too much about who wins.

> Let me point out, first of all, that the R2 supporters are clearly  
> not Republicans, period.

They were intended to be strategic/exaggerating republicans whose  
sincere opinion could have been e.g. R2=100, R1=90, D=70.

> Now, is R2 a "no-good" outcome? Why would Juho claim so?

R2 represented the smaller segment of the Republican party. It won  
because its supporters exaggerated.

> What is "sincere opinion based Range"? How are votes defined in it?

For the purposes of these examples: "votes that use all values  
instead of focusing in use of min and max".

>> I think you should refer to such normalization where at least one
>> frontrunner gets min and one gets max (or something close to that).
>
> This is how most advice on Range Voting does it. Have you seen  
> anything different from a Range supporter?

Yes, at least "summing up the voter utilities to a society utility"  
and some other normalisation schemes.

Juho




		
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