[Election-Methods] Improved Approval Runoff

Paul Kislanko jpkislanko at bellsouth.net
Mon Aug 20 22:23:26 PDT 2007


 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote in reply Peter Barath:

>I guess this is an unjust blame because this thing
>affect all voting methods.

No. It *particularly* affects ranked methods, because ranked methods 
obscure preference strength. While there may be methods which promote 
the expression of absolute utilities in the votes (one possibility is 
mentioned below by Mr. Barath), if we set these aside, even Range 
methods may fail to accurately aggregate utilities because of 
normalization, resolution, or, yes, issues of strategy.
 ------------------------
 
to which I reply:

There is no such thing as "utility" to a voter. That is an abstraction used
by analysts for which I have seen no definition that is useful to me, a
voter, despite having pleaded for one on this list for at least three years
now.

If you can't define "utility", don't use that in any argument. If you can,
please do so. 





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