[Election-Methods] Re [Election Methods] Is "sincere" voting in Range suboptimal?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

Little detail not sure I reported before.

In the many-voter election being studied (candidate's utilities for 
ABC are 210), I looked at the subset of the table that involves only 
Approval Votes, i.e., full scale or min (2 or 0).

The utility for sincere voting Range, stated as gain over not voting, 
as percentage of maximum possible (favorite guaranteed to win with 
this strategy, perhaps it is the stuff-the-ballot-box strategy):

48.15%

Utility for Approval Voting strategy (it does not matter if the voter 
votes 200 or 210 with many voters):

44.44%

Utility for Approval *election,* i.e., all votes are Approval style.

41.67%

In this situation, zero-knowledge, 3 candidates, utilities evenly 
spaced (preference strength the same for A>B as B>C), it appears that 
not only does Approval *strategy* worsen the outcome for the voter, 
but Approval *voting* makes it even worse.

I think this effect comes from the ties; ties are more common with 
Approval votes.

This study only looks at the effect on utility of votes presented in 
a context where the vote is possibly not moot, i.e., there is a vote 
that the voter can cast that can affect the outcome. We then assume 
that the voter only actually casts votes that are designed to advance 
the voter's utilities; thus the favorite is rated max only, the 
least-preferred is only rated zero, and the middle candidate can be 
rated 0, 1, or 2. We are studying the effect, essentially, of how the 
middle candidate is rated. I am positing that this is a legitimate 
way to consider the utility of voting strategy with Range Voting, and 
it can be extended to other voting contexts, i.e., the same method 
could be used to study plurality, IRV, etc. However, if the 
conditions are not kept simple, the complexity of the study increases 
very rapidly.