[EM] Anyone got a good analysis on limitations of approvalandrange voting?

[Terry Bouricius]

Yes, Arrow's Theorem does assume ordinal ranking, since the whole goal of 
the decision process was to find a community-wide decision about how 
options should be placed in an order from favorite to least favorite 
(rather than just find a winner), and he expressly dismissed cardinal 
scores as meaningful input. He actually discusses the concept of range 
voting (not by that name) but asserts "It is hard not to see that the 
suggested assignment of utilities is extremely unsatisfactory." Obviously 
Range Voting advocates disagree with his assessment.

Terry Bouricius

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonathan Lundell" <jlundell at pobox.com>
To: "Andrew Myers" <andru at cs.cornell.edu>
Cc: "Election Methods Mailing List" <election-methods at electorama.com>
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: [EM] Anyone got a good analysis on limitations of 
approvalandrange voting?


On Nov 16, 2009, at 2:15 PM, Andrew Myers wrote:

> Jonathan Lundell wrote:
>> This is in part Arrow's justification for dealing only with ordinal (vs 
>> cardinal) preferences in the Possibility Theorem. Add may label it 
>> preposterous, but it's the widely accepted view. Mine as well.
> Arrow's Theorem seems like a red herring in the context of the cardinal 
> vs. ordinal debate. IIA makes just as much sense when applied to range 
> voting as it does to ranked voting. Arrow was just making a simplifying 
> assumption and I don't see that it makes his results lose  generality.

I don't have his proof in front of me (I'm on the road), but I'm pretty 
sure that it assumes ordinal ranking.

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