[EM] Has this idea been considered?

[Toby Pereira]

I can see the point about strategic range just being approval, but strategic 
First-Past-The-Post is just ignoring everyone except the top two candidates, and 
you wouldn't just cut out all other candidates in an election to make it 
simpler. (I think I nicked that point from Warren Smith). If range voting does 
still produce some honest voters then it might still give a better winner than 
approval. I suppose the main worry is that under First-Past-The-Post, people 
know that if they are voting for someone who's unlikely to win then they are 
"wasting" their vote, whereas under range voting, the best strategy isn't 
necessarily as obvious so people lose voting power by not understanding the ins 
and outs of tactical voting. To me, that's probably the biggest point against 
range voting. Having said that, if it's as simple as always give 0 or 10 (if 
it's out of 10), then I imagine it should catch on pretty quickly, although who 
to give the 0s and 10s to might not always be as obvious.

But anyway, I would use range voting for multi-winner elections. For me the 
biggest problem is not which particular system we use to elect a single winner, 
but that there is a single winner that takes everything. When we had the 
referendum for Alternative Vote (Instant Run-off) in the UK, I think most people 
that preferred it to First-Past-The-Post agreed that it was just scratching the 
surface and that although it seemed nicer in principle it wouldn't really make 
much of a material difference (and generally for single-winner systems). And I 
think most people who voted for Alternative Vote really wanted a proportional 
system. Anyway, the point I was going to make is that I wonder what strategies 
people would adopt under a proportional range system - would it always be 0 or 
10?




________________________________
From: Andrew Myers <andru at cs.cornell.edu>
To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
Sent: Fri, 8 July, 2011 19:41:27
Subject: Re: [EM] Has this idea been considered?

To me, Range remains a non-starter for political settings, though I can see some 
valid uses.

I have implicitly argued that the real barrier to adoption of other voting 
method is simply the complexity of constructing one's ballot. Range voting is 
more complex than producing an ordering on candidates. For me the problem of 
determining my own utility for various candidates is quite perplexing;  I can't 
imagine the "ordinary voter" finding it more pleasant.

Range also exposes the possibility of strategic voting very explicitly to the 
voters. Only a chump casts a vote other than 0 or 10 on a 10-point scale. Range 
creates an incentive for dishonesty.

So if the lazy voters are voting approval style because they don't want to sort 
out their utilities, and the motivated voters are voting approval style because 
that's the right strategy, who's left? It seems to me that we might as well have 
Approval and keep the ballots simple rather than use Range.

-- Andrew
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