[EM] the "meaning" of a vote (or lack thereof)

[Warren Smith]

> Lundell:
> Arrow would not, I think, quarrel with the claim that a cardinal ballot has a pragmatic/operational "meaning" as a function of its use in determining a winner.
>
> But but it's an unwarranted leap from that claim to use the ballot scores as a measure of utility. Arrows objection to cardinal scores, or one of them, is that they are not and cannot be commensurable across voters.

--(1) using, not range voting, but DOUBLE RANGE VOTING,
described here:
   http://rangevoting.org/PuzzRevealU2.html
the ballot scores ARE utilities for a strategic-honest voter.  Any
voter who foolishly
uses non-utilities as her scores on her ballot, will get a worse
election result in expectation.  This was not an "unwarranted leap,"
this was a "new advance"
because the Simmons/Smith double-range-voting system is the first
voting system which (a) is good and which (b) incentivizes honest
utility-revelation (and only honest) by voters.

--(2) I agree that it is difficult to measure utilities commensurably
across voters.
However, range voting and double range voting do not do so, and do not
claim to do so.  What IS commensurable across voters, are the scores
voters give to candidates (since those by the rules of the voting system
lie within fixed bounds).   Double range voting will extract honest
utilities from
each voter, but not commensurably, i.e. with different and not-known scaling
factors for each voter.

As a result, neither range voting, nor double range voting, are
"perfect" regret-free voting systems, and they were never claimed to
be.  What I am claiming,
is that a double range voting ballot (honest part) has a MEANING.  It
has a very definite, very unique, very clear, meaning, which due to
the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem is clearer than the meaning of
ballots in any (rank-order, deterministic) voting system Arrow ever
considered in his life.  NO such rank-order system exists or ever can
exist, in which meaning is as clear as in double range voting.

Therefore, Arrow's "meaning"-based argument against score-type and in
favor of rank-order-type ballots, is busted and has no validity.