[EM] Fixing Range Voting

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Greg Nisbet wrote:
> Instant Range-off Voting is an interesting idea. I thought about it once 
> a while ago too. I didn't renormalize the ballots though, I just set the 
> co-highest to 100 and the co-lowest to 0 for each ballot as a sanitation 
> measure. I eventually abadoned it due to nonmonotonicity, but I think 
> the discussion is a valid one.
>  
> There are some problems with Range Voting, and perhaps tweaking it or 
> adding some new features will fix them, perhaps not.
>  
> Most of the problems seem to involve voters being coerced into making 
> extreme ballots for fear of being outcompeted by strategic rivals. 
> Assuming people will be honest out of charity is naive. Some of them 
> will, perhaps many of them will, but unscrupulous individuals could 
> manipulate an election if there were enough of them. So, in the spirit 
> of idiotproofing voting, let's discuss Range Voting spinoffs.
>  
> so for there is:
>  
> IRNR (Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings)
>  
> Cardinal Condorcet http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/cwp13.htm 
>  
> Various semi-proposed tweaking of Range Voting to include an elect 
> majority winner first or elect CW first clause.
>  
> All of these have the same goal and that goal is very simple. To either 
> encourage honest ratings or force more explicit ratings.

You could also turn approval methods into Range methods. For example, 
the Range version of UncAAO (Uncovered Approval, Approval Opposition) 
would treat Range votes as fractional approval votes. However, for 
UncAAO you'd still need an approval cutoff ("I'd rather not have any 
candidates below this value"), which would make the ballot complex. 
Also, the methods would have to use the rating information for some 
other purpose, not just as fractional approval votes (otherwise, 
approval strategy would still work).

> That being said, I think the most promising area of development here is 
> based around the concept of a "conditional vote" that came up a few 
> threads ago. The idea here being that individual ballots should "react" 
> to a particular candidate being kicked out of the hopeful group or 
> something like that.

DSV systems would do something like that. You'd submit an honest ballot, 
and then the system would strategize maximally (not just for you, but 
for all others), first on the honest information, then on the previous 
round's strategic information, until the result settles. That would be a 
sort of automatic conditional ballot. The idea would be that the system 
or computer would be so good at strategizing on your behalf (for all 
voters), that it wouldn't pay off to try to manually use strategy.