[EM] Juho--Schudy's statement is correct.

[Michael Ossipoff]

Juho--

Warren Schudy's statement that, in Range,  it's never optimal to give a 
rating other than top or bottom is correct in public elections. Other than 
the stipulation of public elections (with so many voters that your own 
ballot won't significantly affect the pair-tie probabilities), Schudy's 
statement doesn't need any qualification or fixing.

As I said, if a candidate is exactly at your Approval cutoff, then it 
doesn't matter to your expectation how you rate hir. You can rate hir 
sincerely if you want to. But that shouldn't be called "optimal", when it 
makes no difference how you rate hir.

Mike Ossipoff



On Jul 21, 2007, at 8:05 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

>At 11:00 PM 7/20/2007, Chris Benham wrote:

>>I think Warren Schudy put it well in a  July 2007 draft paper:
>>
>>"Range voting is a generalisation of approval voting where you can
>>give each candidate any score
>>between 0 and 1. Optimal strategies never vote anything other than 0
>>or 1, so range voting
>>complicates ballots and confuses voters for little or no gain."
>
>Good. Since this is simple, clear, and false, we should be able to
>dispose of it quickly. I actually gave an example,

The description of Warren Schudy is clear and compact. If there are
some corrections to it, it would be nice to get them defined in some
equally compact format.

I can see that in some cases, e.g. when some candidates can not win,
they could get also other than min and max ratings. But also in these
cases the voter may want to either maximize or minimize the number of
points they will get. And there are cases where the probabilities
make it possible to give some intermediate values without losing
voting power.

I also think that Range is a good method in non-contentions polls and
elections. But in the statement above a competitive election was of
course the assumption.

And there are some minor things in the description, e.g. Range is
typically defined as having only a fixed number of possible ratings,
not any value between 0 and 1.

But isn't t so that the description above is a quite valid
description as a main rule for competitive elections (where we want
all voters to cast votes of similar strength). If someone has as
exact and compact formulations (to fix this one or to propose a new
one) on where and how Range works please put them forward.

Juho