[EM] Why the concept of "sincere" votes in Range is flawed.

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

> It seems that voting method "Approval" has cut its
> ties to English term "approval" (at least at the EM
> list).
> 
> In ranking based methods EM people seem to assume
> that voters have some easy to identify transitive
> order of the candidates in their mind (=sincere
> opinion).
> 
> I find it revealing that there is not much
> discussion on the possibility to cast non-transitive
> votes. Such votes would be strategically more
> efficient than the transitive ones. Use of
> transitive votes seem to reflect the idea that the
> sincere opinion of a rational voter would always be
> transitive. (Well, of course casting non-transitive
> votes would be technically more challenging.)

I want to add to this by saying that if Approval is about approval, 
well, then discussions about frontrunner plus strategies won't capture 
the intent or point of the method. If the statement for Approval voting 
is "vote for those you like", or "vote for those of which you approve", 
then one should expect voters to do that, absent strategic incentive. 
Say there's a certain group of people that a voter approves of. If he 
has to plan beyond that point, then that's strategy. On the other hand, 
if Approval really is "pick those candidates you like more than or equal 
to the frontrunner you like the most", then there's not much 
approval-ish about the method, in the ordinary sense. It asks the voter 
to optimally configure his ballot. If we're going to do that, we should 
leave the task to a computer and use DSV instead.

Perhaps you agree with most of this, but I couldn't find anywhere else 
to put it.