[Election-Methods] [EM] RV comments

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:35 PM 7/30/2007, Juho wrote:
>One possible definition of non-competitiveness is that voters
>strongly want such an alternative to win that the society considers
>best, not the one that they personally consider best.

Here is the problem. In a healthy society, people do want what is 
best for the whole society, but they also want what is best for 
themselves. With Range Voting, we suggest, they tell us what they 
want and how much they want it.

It's possible to set up Range Voting with bids, where you are 
effectively bidding your rating for the candidate. It is sometimes 
argued that this would be plutocracy, *but* in most societies, the 
bulk of the wealth and discretionary spending power is *not* with the 
wealthy, it is distributed widely. The problem is that the spending 
power of the poor and middle income people is not organized, whereas 
the spending power of the wealthy is available for rapid allocation. 
This is why the wealthy are considered more powerful. Now, in some 
places, the concentration of power and wealth into the hands of the 
few may be different than this, but I don't think this is the case in 
what are called the western democracies, and in quite a few other 
places as well.

The distributed wealth of even the poor is enormous in some places. 
But organizing it, that is another story. This is why FA/DP is so 
important. It's a method of organizing poor people! It's one that 
won't run away with their power and use it for narrow purposes. It 
does this by leaving with power with them, and merely advising, and 
it does the advising in such a way as to make it trustworthy. The 
advice does not descend like manna from the top. Rather it filters 
down through the proxy network from trusted proxy to client, each 
link dependent upon the *maintenance* of trust.

Consider you are a middle-level proxy in such a system. Your 
high-level proxy, someone you have known for a long time, you talk 
frequently, suddenly starts giving you advise that doesn't make sense 
to you. You ask about it, and the answers aren't clear. Now, do you
(1) change your proxy.
(2) complain and see how the proxy responds
(3) pass down different advice that was given to you
(4) pass down no advice
(5) pass down the advice that you don't understand, knowing that your 
clients trust you. Of course, you may have the same problem as them.

The structure is a filter, an intelligent filter, with no outside control.

>  Practical
>examples on elections that may be non-competitive are voting on which
>cloud on the sky is the prettiest, or voting on which flavour of ice
>cream is the best flavour (everyone will buy their preferred flavour
>after the election, they are thus not forced to buy and eat the
>winning flavour ice cream), or what movie is the best ever (I believe
>www.imdb.com has used some Range like method).

Those are examples of non-competitive "elections," really, as 
described, they are not elections at all, they are polls.

What if a community has various options for how to spend a fund that 
became available. The various options are presented in a Range election.

Now, would I recommend this? No. I'd recommend a Range poll, followed 
by standard deliberative process in a Town Meeting or the like. And 
it would still be a recommendation, perhaps, not a control, upon a 
Council or whatever governmental body the town has with the authority 
to make spending decisions.

I recommend Range for public elections, even though I would much 
rather see better process even than Range, but the latter processes 
involve more significant structural changes. The arguments about 
Range apply to Approval as well. What if some people are sincere so 
they approve more candidates, others are "narrow and selfish" so they 
only approve their favorite. The same arguments can be made.

But they are specious. Implementing, Approval, Range 1, will not give 
special power to the selfish. Nor will higher resolution Range. It's 
a theory often stated, based on a shallow analysis of what happens.

Usually what is done is to assume that Approval style votes are not 
sincere. It's a silly assumption. It is up to people to decide how 
much they want something. I've pointed out that there is a natural 
incentive to vote sincerely, there is a value to it that is not 
easily quantified. It is reflected, perhaps, in the fact that Range 
Voting, with sincere votes, actually does maximize overall 
satisfaction; how can a method maximize your satisfaction if you 
don't provide the information?

Voting approval style puts maximal force in the direction of your 
favorite. Now, is that accurate or not? Who are we to say? Here is 
the paradox: if you want to exaggerate, you must have some motive. If 
you don't care all that much, why bother to exaggerate?

So if you exaggerate, you must care, enough to exaggerate. Oops, 
that's sincere, you *aren't* exaggerating. Perhaps.

It is up to the voters to decide what they really want and to express 
that. The method will take this into consideration. If you put all 
your eggs in one candidate's basket, that's great for you if the 
candidate wins, and you have created some edge toward that. But if 
you fail, you could end up with a worse outcome. So, in fact, you 
might need to Approve two candidates, if you want to be safe. But, 
oops!, by voting for two, Approval style, you are telling the system 
that you don't care which of these is elected. If you care, you just 
might be better off expressing it more precisely.

Generally, in such situations, in fact, the sincere strategy is as 
good as the Approval strategy -- *almost*. The difference really 
isn't great, particularly in Range N where N is relatively high. 
Range 2 works well if you can exactly express your preference, but 
error in expressing preference, oops, causes error in maximizing your 
outcome. But all this really means is that you have to be careful 
about rounding off. You might easily be better off rounding up, for 
example, or down, to an Approval style vote. Which could mean less error.

I've suggested that a preference marker be added to Range elections. 
It's not used in determining the net scores. It is used for 
preference analysis. If runoffs are triggered under some conditions, 
as shown by preference analysis, such as the existence of a candidate 
who pairwise beats the Range winner, it becomes more possible to vote 
sincerely... or to vote Approval style with less risk. Generally, it 
should raise everyone's expected return.

This is what we are aiming for. It makes little sense to me to lower 
everyone's expected return in order to avoid giving "selfish" people 
some benefit.

The fact is that we want people to tell us what they want and how 
much they want it. We will use this to determine what to give them. 
If they lie to us, what can they expect? They may benefit in this 
particular election, but overall, they will lose; it has to be that 
way for actions that lower social welfare, unless some vary special 
conditions exist that guarantee that some group is always on the plus 
side in elections.



>>By limiting ourselves to "competitive elections," we are limiting
>>ourselves, actually, to dysfunctional societies. We need to know that.
>
>You are quite ambitious.

In a way, yes. I'm trying to change the world. Now, Juho, I've found 
the lever and I've found the fulcrum, and I'm pushing. What happens 
when you push, in free space, a really massive object.

It moves. Any force moves it, but perhaps only a little, the 
acceleration is small. However, acceleration accumulates. I've been 
pushing for some time now, and I see motion. Even though that motion 
is slow, should I assume that pushing is useless? Fact is, some other 
people are starting to push with me. And this is, indeed, the plan.

I keep explaining it and a few get it. Those few may be busy with 
this or that, but if they get it, opportunities will arise for them 
to push. It starts to snowball.

If it is a good idea, if it does what theory indicates, essentially, 
if I'm write.

This is not like other reforms. I'm not trying to *control* the 
world. Rather, I am trying to seed structures that will grow that 
will enable people to control their own lives and societies, far more 
efficiently and effectively than present structures and systems.

And it's not complicated. A few people have taken the trouble to 
investigate it, to ask the challenging questions and reflect on the answers.

And, following FA/DP principles, if you were a proxy for other 
people, and a client came to you with this idea, what would you do?

Would you consider it?
Would you pass it up among your peers in the structure for wider consideration.
Would you pass it up for higher consideration?
Would you tell your client why it was a bad idea?
Would you listen if the client said that he had considered all those 
points, and here were the answers he came up with?
Or would you decide to stick with your prior opinion, just because 
you are always right?
Would you drop the client for pestering you for explanations of why 
you aren't passing it on or at least discussing it with peers, 
perhaps connecting your client with some committee?

I invented FA/DP because I needed a filter for ideas like FA/DP. If 
we had FA/DP, we would get FA/DP *or something better* in short 
order. It really could take only a few years to have a major impact. 
Right now, it is in a very early stage, where one or two people 
count. Later on, it will have its own inertia, and nobody would be 
able to stop it.

Some even worry about that.... indeed, I do. The law of unintended 
consequences can bite hard. However, FA/DP does not destroy anything. 
FAs don't attack *anything*, at least not head one. They could be 
said to be attacking isolation, ignorance, powerlessness, etc. But 
not the "bad guys."

If the people have knowledge and power and the ability to find 
consensus, bad guys will not be a problem. If they try to beat it, 
they will just break themselves. It really could be quite hard to 
stop, unless you nip it in the bud.

I've had paranoid dreams about it. But not the slightest sign of any 
opposition, really. FA/DP has major implications for places like 
China. But it will be up to the Chinese, not me. And what would it 
look like initially? Groups of civic minded people cooperating to 
help fulfill broadly accepted public policy that is being blocked, 
perhaps, by institutional inertia and corruption. It won't attack the 
corrupt, at least the FA won't.

But communication exposes corruption and makes it very difficult to continue.

In China, just so you understand better what I'm saying, 
environmental protection is official policy. Which is largely ignored 
because local officials are corrupt. Environmental groups in China 
have been reasonably successful because they are promoting official 
Communist Party policy and they are careful not to challenge the Party.

They are merely helping out.

There is a saying, if you want to shoot the King, don't miss. In 
Tiananmen Square, the hotheads wanted to shoot the King. There were 
other leaders who were really sincere and who had a more cooperative 
approach. But the students did not have an organizational structure 
that could handle the opportunity that Tiananmen Square represented. 
The moderates could not control the hotheads, who shouted louder and 
provoked more strongly. The government had two choices, essentially: 
surrender, resign in disgrace, and quite possibly face severe 
punishment, or bring in troops from outside, that did not understand 
the local dialect, and suppress the students. Which one would you 
have chosen, in their shoes?

Chaos is very dangerous. Removing a tyrant from power is a very 
delicate thing, it is quite easy to have someone else step into the 
power vacuum who is worse. If you want to shoot the King, don't miss. 
And don't do it unless you are fully prepared for what will ensue. 
It's usually a mess, millions can die. In other words, don't miss 
*and* don't remove the existing power center.

There will be times for the people to take matters into their own 
hands and shift power, and it can be done nonviolently, for the most 
part. This whole thing about competitive elections vs. cooperative 
elections is very important.

And election methods, I suggest, should work well in both 
environments. This *requires* collecting preference strength 
information. If you don't you are flying blind.

>  Making the societies non-competitive is a
>huge task. The market economy is for example currently strongly based
>on competition (harnessing competition to provide good results for all).

That's actually nonsense. Competition is an issue and it keeps some 
honest that might otherwise not be, but most business runs far more 
on cooperation than on competition. Competition functions, in our 
economy, to bound the transactions, but salespeople who are 
cutthroat, we want to kill the competition, are generally not as good 
as those whose goal is to serve the customer as well as possible, and 
they are not even thinking about the competition, most of the time.

Read the stuff on sales, the training materials for salesmen. Some of 
the best writing in psychology and sociology is there.

There is an old joke about politicians. The most valuable trait is 
sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made!

It's true, actually. However, faking it, deeply and for a long time, 
is ... difficult. What can happen is that, acting out sincerity, you 
become sincere. Not always.

>And we don't need to go any further than to this mailing list to see
>strong competitive attitudes (on e.g. which method is best).

You've got to think of the sample. Now, consider this, raised by your 
comment. There are some here who are really interested in the truth. 
They would rather shrivel up and blow away than lie or deceive to 
promote the methods they favor. If they find that an argument of 
their own is specious, they stop using it, and they may even admit 
that it was wrong. If someone else comes up with an idea that is 
better than their own, they will change their views. You take a 
person like this who's been doing it for a while, it can look like 
they have strong, even inflexible opinions. But that could be an 
error, it could be depth instead. They really have considered, long 
ago, the arguments you are coming up with, and rejected them after 
much thought.

And sometimes you will come up with something that they didn't think 
of. A new argument. If the "expert" I'm describing hasn't become 
attached, he will recognize this and will entertain this argument anew.

And there are others, you can rub their noses in their repeated 
errors, and they will continue to repeat them, never budging an inch.

I wrote in one of these lists that some people would rather be right 
than be happy. In other words, some people won't allow themselves to 
be "wrong," ever. Of course, this means that they get stuck in what 
is actually wrong.... and this will, almost certainly, make them unhappy.



>I think Warren Schudy already pointed out that there is a risk that
>changing the voting method with good intentions may in some cases
>lead to worse results, not better. The equation is of course complex
>(and changes in the spirit of the society are often (but not
>necessarily) slow).

Of course, what we are proposing is the tiniest of changes, the 
tiniest change of any of the proposals here. Not some world-shaking 
complicated reform, requiring large investment, and, associated with 
it, large risk.

Simply Count All the Votes. Simply do what we should have been doing 
all along, but did not do because of defective analysis, which wasn't 
realized because the analysis and its assumptions were never made explicit.

If you read Robert's Rules on voting procedure, it says that, in the 
standard method (which is Plurality), the clerk should discard 
ballots with more than one vote on them because it cannot be 
discerned which one was intended.

There is an assumption that multiple votes are an error.

Why is it an error? Because it is against the rules. Why is it 
against the rule? Because it confuses the clerk.

In face-to-face, show of hands elections, it has never been 
prohibited to raise your hands for more than one candidate, and I'm 
sure people do it from time to time. I've never heard it challenged. 
Translating this to secret ballot, an old error was made, an 
assumption that people would only vote for their favorite. It wasn't 
discussed, I think, or at least not deeply, and alternatives were not 
considered.

And the fact is that in close, cooperative societies, Plurality works 
quite well! It is competition and scale that make Approval and Range 
more important. They simulate deliberative process.

>As discussed many times the strategy problems of Range may be too bad
>to be overcome. We should keep seeking for better methods all the
>time of course.

Please describe a bad problem with Range. Specifically, and show 
examples. Hopefully, they will be realistic.

The simulations show that the utility maximization of Range does not 
seriously damage the sincere voters. So what is "too bad." I asked 
that question before. No answer. But maybe it is below, I haven't 
read the rest.

>>"Too" rewarding is a quantitative judgement. What is "too rewarding"?
>
>The problem of being too rewarding may become obvious to people e.g.
>if after ten elections where Democrats have voted strategically
>(D=100, R=0) and Republicans have voted sincerely (R=90, D=80) (I
>assume that voters were requested to mark their utility values in the
>ballots) Democrats have won every election despite of receiving only
>a clear minority of votes.

The scenario is preposterous. Republicans or Democrats have no 
monopoly on sincerity.

And your assumption that voters will be requested to mark utility 
values on the ballot is one contrary to my own recommendations. 
Rather, the ballot instructions I favor focus on what the method 
does, how it works, and do not presume to tell the voter how to vote.

"For each candidate, mark a rating. That rating will be considered a 
number of votes for that candidate, added together with ratings from 
all other voters, and the candidate with the most votes wins."

And I would avoid, at least at first, any "Quorum Rule" 
complications. Sum of Votes, quite traditional, actually, and a 
continuation of Plurality and a continuation of Approval. Nobody has 
proposed using average approval in Approval. Well, that may be wrong. 
There are varieties of Approval where there is a Yes/No vote.

However, there is strong tradition on how to handle that, existing 
practice. Conflicting referenda, if more than one pass, are resolved 
by implementing the one with the most Yes votes. Not the highest average vote.

And I'm not sure even as much as I wrote would be on the ballot. But 
I do think it is a good idea, at least at first. People should know 
what to expect will be done with their vote.

Then, the voter is an action, not a "sincere response to a question," 
which votes presently are not, nor should they become. People should 
decide for themselves what their votes mean, but they should know how 
the system will interpret the vote.

>>This argument has been presented many times against Range, and I
>>have never seen an analysis of what "too rewarding" is. Obviously,
>>something is missing, there are assumptions being made that, for
>>example, there should be no reward for strategic voting.
>>
>>Yet every method, to some degree, rewards strategic voting, and the
>>reward can be large. What is "too rewarding?"
>
>If e.g. strategic voting is often possible, easy to apply, influences
>the results and maybe elects some clearly "no-good" candidates.

No. Please show an example. (In Range, the strategy is only to vote 
Approval style. If a candidate is going to win because some people 
vote approval style, I'd argue -- and many argue -- that this is 
quite a reasonable winner. Not a "no-good" one unless the electorate 
wants to elect a no-good.


>In Range there are many possible ways to use the method. I think it
>should always be made clear if one asks the voters to mark their
>sincere utilities, normalized utilities or "fully extremized"
>opinions (with option to cast also weak votes as needed). The Range
>problems typically emerge when the voters use the scale in different
>ways (strategically or with "more sincere intentions"). For me the
>most sincere Range is one where I very seldom use the min and max
>values (since I think a typical politician is not the worst choice
>for the job nor the best).

No examples have been shown yet. Yes, it's true, if people vote their 
sincere ratings, *not* normalizing, the best outcomes are shown by 
Range. However, there is a problem. If there is no normalization, of 
any kind, then there is no commensurability. There is a way, I think, 
to normalize votes with what I call the first normalization, but I 
won't get into it here.

The short answer is that we expect people, where there is some 
reasonable choice in the election, normalize their vote to max their 
favorite and min their most dislike, *among the frontrunners.* Others 
may not do this, consider frontrunners, but they will generally still 
normalize. And these voters are helping to make the system work 
better, those are closer to commensurable sincere votes.

It's a voting method, not a poll. It is a way for people to express 
power with some delicacy, instead of all push this way for these and 
all push this way for those, we can all push this way for some set 
and all push that way for another, and everything in between.

If you were a control systems engineer, you'd recognize this as 
obviously safer.


>>It is a very serious error to term Approval-style voting in Range
>>as "insincere." There is no basis for it other than a convention,
>>and such conventions are dangerous, where they create special
>>terminology, accepted in a specialized field, with implications
>>quite different from general usage. We get to use big words in
>>special fields, and we can even coin terms.
>
>Depends on how the voters were expected to vote.

Sure. I expect them, most of them, to exercise their vote to maximize 
their own personal satisfaction.

And that is what we want them to do. The question of intermediate 
votes is complex; simulations and study, so far, show some small 
advantage in some situations to Approval style voting, but that 
presumes knowledge of the probabilities, and there are complexities 
of the interation between probabilities and sincere Range ratings, 
which are then used to determine the optimal Approval Vote.

It's really less complicated to simply normalize; for the 
frontrunners, put your favorite in max, the worst in min, and then 
decide where to put the rest, and not sweat about it a lot. Really 
don't like a third party candidate? No problem. Even if you like this 
one better than the frontrunner, the bad one, it's perfectly okay to 
rate him min.

It is not a poll, it is an action with consequences. The meaning of 
the action is in the consequences, for those who care. As they say, 
the road to hell is paved with good intentions -- which means 
intentions that are supposedly good but aren't, and which are 
implemented without regard to consequences because they are "good 
intentions," not paying attention to all the messages that say "Don't do that!"

If you've got an election with a good guy, a bad guy, and a *really 
bad* guy, what you should do depends on your assessment of what is 
realistic. If the good guy can't win, in your judgement, your vote is 
clear. Max the bad guy. But if it is close, then min the bad guy.

Intermediate? Depends on the ratings and probabilities. They both 
count. Zero knowledge, a very good strategy is to vote sincerely, it 
equals Approval, actually, if we have Range of sufficient resolution.

But when you have probabilities, it shifts. You then know what 
pairwise elections are important. And in pairwise elections, you want 
to cast full strength votes, generally. Unless you really don't care.

When there is a pairwise election, when the other candidates are 
moot, it's just silly to vote intermediate ratings for them. That 
there are other candidates on the ballot does not affect how your 
vote is going to change the real world, if it has any effect at all.

And we should always act as if our actions will affect the result. 
That was why I did the study of Range 2, basing utilities on those 
restricted votes, the ones that would affect the outcome.

>>Range *is* "Approval with option to cast weakened votes," it does
>>not become it. And it turns out that those who cast weakened votes,
>>even if only a few (so few, indeed, that one voter can accomplish
>>it), *help* not only the strategic voter, but also the sincere ones.
>
>What I mean by "becoming" is that majority of the voters come to the
>conclusion that they will use min and max values and forget the mid
>values (assuming that they were originally expected/requested to use
>also other than min and max values).

Get this. I expect most voters, if we start to Count All the Votes, 
will just cast one. Does this mean that it's useless?

Well, for starters, it is actually easier than excluding overvotes

But then a few percent doing something else improves the outcomes in 
many elections.

And in Range, interesting fact. The value of a vote, under the 
assumption that the vote counts, jumps if the election goes from 
Approval to Range 2. It appears that even a single voter can make 
this happen, so if only a few voters use intermediate ratings, it 
improves the outcome for everyone.

I'm not sure I fully understand it, so it may be speculation, but 
controls systems sometimes work better when a little noise is added. 
The single votes create some "buzz," and could make the response of a 
system better.

But those are the numbers, so far. Range 2, 3 candidates, sincere 
candidate utilities of 210 for the voter, zero knowledge, relative 
utility of voting an exactly sincere Range vote under the assumption 
that the vote counts, 40% over not voting. Approval Vote, 40% over 
not voting, doesn't matter which, in large elections. (Does in 
small.) Change the election to Approval, expected satisfaction, 33% 
over not voting.

Isn't that interesting?

Now, I could easily have made mistakes. However, Warren Smith has now 
taken my study, refined it, and published it with both our names on 
it. There may be some mistakes he introduced, and it remains possible 
that I led him down the rosy path with some assumptions that looked 
good but which were false (certain assumptions about probability), 
but that would really only impact the exact results, not the method. 
The method I've suggested has some weight.

It's a calculation, not a simulation.

>>Please explain it to me, why we should consider strategic votes as
>>something to prevent. They are a medicine that voters use when they
>>are sick, when society is sick.
>
>Strategic votes themselves are maybe not a problem if they are just
>noise in the election, but if the strategists are able to change the
>outcome of the election to something else than the society wants it
>to be, that'd be a problem.

They are not noise, they are binary data. And how do you know "what 
society wants the outcome to be"? What is the standard?

Look there is no way of doing it that makes sense except some kind of 
Range poll, if you could get people to vote sincerely.

And if you can't, then you *still* get better information. The 
serious distortions of strategic voting are when people reverse 
preferences, which some other methods practically require in some 
circumstances.

I find it odd that some will argue against the mild alleged 
vulnerability of Range Voting to "strategy," which merely means 
voting range as a pure ranked method with two ranks, and then swallow 
the much more insincere votes coming from strategic vulnerabilities 
of Condorcet methods, perhaps claiming that the latter are "rare," 
perhaps because it's too complicated for people to figure out, so 
they won't do it.

But with Range, these same people will claim that the sincere voters 
are "suckers." That they are going to be taken advantage of by 
conniving Approval voters.

It's a double standard.

Voting methods should be judged, at this point, by simulations, and 
major work should be put into making the simulations as realistic as possible.

And then methods should also be studied by gathering much more 
complete ballot data from real elections. We need to know what is on 
each ballot. And there are good reasons for making all this public. 
Among other things, done properly, it could make election fraud 
almost impossible.


>>Essentially, trying to maximize my personal gain in a Range
>>election by voting Approval style is short-sighted. If everyone
>>does it, everyone loses, on average.
>
>Note that the "on average" addition is critical. If the strategists
>will benefit, that's a good enough reason for them to vote
>strategically.

Maybe. But in Range, the "strategy" is little more than deciding 
where to place your scale and how to expand it. It's still honest, actually.

I expect voters to vote in the way that makes them happiest, with 
Range. They can vote sincerely, they vote Plurality, they can vote 
Approval. (In the small election case, with balanced utilities, there 
was an edge to voting 200 over 220. I have a six-voter Range 2 
election, complete list of possible votes, cooking. It's being done 
to test the formulas for our exact study of many-voter elections.

So the optimal strategy in small Range 2 elections is actually to 
vote Plurality style.... even if your utilities are balanced. It 
follows, then, that your actual Approval cutoff is above your sincere 
rating for the candidate..... in large elections, this disappears in 
the noise, but it's still there.
>If Range is presented to voters as "vote min or max, or a weak
>intermediate vote if you like" then voting in Approval style is no
>problem. If Range is presented as "mark your sincere preferences,
>e.g. R=90, D=80" then Approval style voting should be considered
>strategical and those voters that voted as requested may feel
>themselves betrayed.

Only an idiot would use the word "sincere" in ballot instructions. 
Might as well say, "Vote like the suckers that most people are."

I am *not* saying that voting sincerely in zero knowledge is being a 
sucker. But voting so, ignoring the identify of the frontrunners, is, 
quite simply, foolish. There is *strategy* for voting Range.

If people don't use it but do normalize, they will not be harmed seriously.

I've never seen a ballot instruction that told people how they should 
vote, other than the rules, such as "Vote for One," which is what is common.

For Approval, that changes to "Vote for each candidate as you 
choose." Or if the Nos are made explicit, which guarantees a majority 
winner or *no* winner, by the way then "For each candidate, Vote Yes or No."

>Range with 100% of voters using Approval strategy gives same results
>as Approval.

Duh. However, it ain't gonna happen. Some people will vote their 
sincere ratings, of some kind of sincerity. Intermediate ratings will be used.

>  Range with some voters voting in Approval style gives
>more power to the Approval style voters. Range with one opinion group
>voting more in Approval style than other groups favours that
>political group.

But a "political group" voting this way isn't a "political group." 
Political groups promote agendas.

Range will not favor some political group over another, unless we 
form a "We Gotta Vote Sincerely If It Kills Us" political group. 
Would you join? I wouldn't. I'd vote sincerely if I thought it 
wouldn't harm me more than a little -- might be *very* little -- and 
I'd vote Approval style if I cared.

For intermediate candidates who aren't going to win no matter what I 
do, in my opinion, I will vote intermediate ratings. Why not?

And this is part of the benefit of Range. We start to see the true 
strength -- or weakness -- of third parties. Warren calls it the 
"incubator effect," and he's written a lot of hype about it, but it's 
real, I think.

>A general comment. The main problem in these discussions seems to be
>the problem of mixing Approval style, normalized votes and fully
>utility based votes in Range. Different groups have different power.
>The dynamics of the system may drive it towards Approval style
>voting, not towards more sincere utility oriented voting.

I expect if we have Range 2, the likely first implementation in 
public elections (CR-3, votes from 0 to 2 or Minus, Zero, Plus), most 
voters won't vote the middle at all. They will vote as they voted 
before. And with Approval, even before that, the large majority of 
voters will vote as they did before.

But we will get better outcomes. Who what is this nonsense about power?

People who vote sincerely are very unlikely to see outcomes where 
they seriously regret their vote. So where is the pressure alleged 
toward voting Approval Style. Politicians will still try to get 
people to think that they are 100% and everyone else is a zero. So new?

Frankly, I'm getting tired of the B.S., analysis that is dreamed up 
with no connection to reality, horror scenarios that have no 
connection with what is likely to happen.

There are *real* horrors that actually happen, Warren has written 
about quite a few. There are real dangers from some of the election 
reform proposals, though I don't want to exaggerate them, the sky 
will not fall if we get IRV, though we might get some bad election 
results (it happens a surprising percentage of the time, apparently, 
if third parties start to get strong, as supposedly IRV will help happen.)