[EM] Meta-criteria 3 of 9: Value: expressiveness

[Raph Frank]

On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Only when the vote is an
> election, not a poll, does dishonesty come into the picture, as utility
> conflicts with expressivity.

However, as you say, choosing to vote approval style under range is a
statement too.

The ideal system would be something like declared strategy voting,
where you just tell the system your utilities and let it worry about
the back-end.

Abd has made the point that actually turning out to vote is also part
of the system.  If someone doesn't care about the election, then they
won't show up.  Thus even a simple election with 2 candidates and
majority rule becomes slightly (true) range-like.  You can vote A, B
or don't care.

> This leads to a certain paradox: systems which seek to increase
> expressiveness by increasing voter freedom - for instance, Range as compared
> to a Condorcet system - could increase strategic opportunities, and thus in
> the end reduce expressiveness - for instance, if Range were to end up as
> pure Approval in practice.

That isn't a paradox.  Range is more expressive than approval even if
99% of the voters vote approval style.

Expressiveness isn't reduced, it just isn't increased as much as it could be.

Maybe you could have 2 announcements after the election, the range
winner and also the winner after strategy is applied.

For example, the method might be:

- Determine the top-2 using the full range
- Have everyone's vote recomputed using the strandard approval strategy of
-- "vote for one of the top-2 and anyone preferred to the expected winner"
- The approval winner is then elected, but the range info is available

> In my conclusion (email 9 of this series), I'll come back to this paradox,
> and attempt to start resolving it.

I guess I should have read that first :).