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

[Chris Benham]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

>Further, Venzke is not testing Range 2, but higher-resolution Range. 
>Approval *is* a Range method. What is the optimum Range *method* in 
>terms of maximizing voter expected utility with the best strategy? Is 
>it Approval -- this is what is being claimed by some, but without 
>comparing Approval to Range N, other than a high value of N.
>

How can it be best strategy to vote approval-style in Range 99, but  
with the voters using a more
restricted ratings ballot some other way of voting becomes better?

BTW, I find it annoying and stupid that you (Abd) have (apparently 
unilaterally)  changed the name of Approval
from "Range2" to "Range1" and the name of what was previously called 
"Range3" to "Range2" etc.

> Proportionally, offhand, it looks to me as if 
>the voter's vote is not moot in the same percentage of cases for 
>Range or Approval.
>  
>

One of the approval strategies (mean-based thresholding) is best in 
Range because it increases the chance that
voters employing it will have some (positive from their perspective) 
impact on the result.  Range ballots give voters
a greater choice of  inferior strategies so I would expect that on 
average in Range more votes are "moot".

>My own political strategy is to promote Approval as being a great 
>improvement at very small cost.
>
Good luck with that. I agree that adding one more voting-slot is 
attractive, just for candidates that the voter is
unsure whether to approve or not. But doing so allows voters to express 
a lot more pairwise preferences, and so
raises questions about which is really the best algorithm. For example, 
how do we justify not meeting the "3-slot Condorcet"
criterion? 

Approval is my favourite way of counting 2-slot ballots, but  CR (or 
Range) isn't my favourite way of counting 3-slot
ballots.

Chris Benham