[EM] a question about apportionment

[Juho Laatu]

I think thee may two different kind of Range elections, competitive and non-competitive. In the non-competitive ones all voters *are*expected* to rate all the candidates sincerely. This kind of voting could take place e.g. in some sports competition. All judges are expected to be neutral. In politics elections are typically competitive. Voters want to do all they can to make their favourites win. In Range stratgic voting is so easy and obvious (although picking the right strategy may be really difficult when there are more than two potential winners) that it may well become a norm not only to cast a normalized vote but to also use approval strategy. Sincere voting could be considered a mistake that voters should avoid. In Condorcet strategic opportunities are quite rare and people could therefore (and because of the "unjustified nature" of burial) well consider strategic voting immoral. Just like dropping two ballots in the ballot box may be considered inappropriate in most elections today (i.e. he person doing so could not proudly brag that she found an efficient strategic way to vote but she better stay silent to avoid being considered an enemy of the otherwise well working society).

Juho


On 9.5.2011, at 10.26, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> Jameson Quinn wrote:
>> How hard it is to vote in each system is an empirical, not a theoretical system. The evidence is pretty clear that it is easier for most people to rate candidates on an absolute scale - whether numeric or verbal - rather than ranking them relative to each other. That is true despite the fact that it is illogical, that in some sense it should be easier to give a ranked vote which contains less information. But the fact remains: people can usually vote faster, with less ballot spoilage, and with less self-reported difficulty, under Range as compared to Condorcet.
> 
> I must be odd then, as I find ranking easier than rating. When I rate, I feel like I have to be certain I'm rating them all by a common exact standard, and that I'm not just being right about the ordering but also about "by how much": "Do I rate X at 50% or 55%?". In contrast, for ranking, I just have to know: "I would rather live in a nation with X in power than with Y in power".
> 
> In addition, for Range in particular, if I want to make my vote count, I have to vote Approval-style. Picking the right approval cutoff requires access to polls as well as some amount of cleverness. Again, I'm not completely sure why, but I feel that is something I have to do in Range, but ballot optimization in Condorcet (burial, that is), is cheating and bad; perhaps because optimizing well in Range doesn't involve the chance that a candidate you really didn't want to win will win, whereas that can happen with burial.
> 
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info