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

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Aug 26, 2011, at 12:07 PM, fsimmons at pcc.edu wrote:

> Second, I want to get at the heart of the incommensurability complaint: in most elections some voters 
> will have a much greater stake in the outcome than others.  For some it may be a life or death issue; if X 
> is elected your friend's death sentence is commuted, if Y is elected he goes to the chair.  Other voters 
> may have only a mild interest in the outcome.
> 
> How can this problem of incommensurability of stakes be addressed by election methods?
> 
> Answer: it cannot be addressed by any method that satisfies the basic requirements of neutrality, 
> anonymity, secret ballot, one-person-one-vote, etc.  
> 
> So this "failure" to provide for stark differences in stakes is not unique to Range.  It applies to all decent 
> voting methods.
> 
> Having said that, Range has an option that is better than most methods that are based on ordinal 
> ballots:  give top rating to all candidates that might pardon or commute your friend's death sentence, and 
> give bottom rating to all recent former governors of Texas and their ilk.

;-) (I think we could safely make that "former and present".)

I don't think that normalization (which I think we'll all agree is necessary--each voter has the same weight, no matter how apoplectic they are about the issues) addresses the commensurability problem (if that's even the right term for the cardinality problem). The question is more the meaning of the internal scale: what does "half the utility" mean, etc?

Warren (IIRC, and I paraphrase anyway) that we can only interpret the "meaning" of a cast ballot as its function in the vote count ("meaning is use"). I agree. 

The name "approval" is unfortunate, since it suggests that a proper instruction would be "vote for the candidates you approve". But that's a suggestion for a voting strategy. The proper instruction is more like: vote for one or more candidates; the candidate with the most votes wins.

Setting aside non-deterministic methods (reluctantly), isn't something like the same thing true of cardinal rating methods? A voter might try to come up with a utility score (however she might manage that), but that's only one of many possible voting strategies. 

Moreover, suppose in 2012 we have Obama vs Bachmann vs Paul (somebody decided on a third-party run). A diehard Bachmann supporter will surely rate Bachmann 100, Obama 0, and Paul somewhere in between, and that would be strategically rational, even optimum. But on what possible utility scale does the election of any semi-plausible presidential candidate have infinitely more utility than another? Whatever these numbers are, they're not utility in any conventional sense.