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

[Toby Pereira]

From: Warren Smith warren.wds at gmail.com

I wasn't denying that the honest sub-ballots had a meaning, but that the meaning of a score on a range ballot is probably less clear to mot people than the meaning of a score on a ranked ballot. This was my point, not that the range ballot lacked meaning in any objective sense (yes, I know this is tangential to your main point).

>Voting "A>B>C", while it may be "clear" to you, in fact may cause A to lose,
>or C to win, in every deterministic non-dictatorial ranked-voting scheme...
>This is the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.
>This suggests that the problem is not that A>B>C has meaning and rnage-style
>ballots do not.  It is that you have a wrong perception of that.  But the whole
>point of my post waas to correct this wrong perception.  If you now say
>"but this wrong perception exists!" that does not refute my post.  It supports
>my post's raison d'etre.

Well, I don't think every ranked voting system fails the participation criterion (e.g. Borda Count), so I don't think the above is strictly true, although I'm not denying that there will always be certain strategic considerations beyond just voting honestly. But I would argue that none of this is really relevant to what your ballot actually means (unless we're going to debate what "means" means). If I vote A>B>C, it means that I am stating my preference is for A to be elected first and foremost, but that I'd rather B be elected than C. The fact that voting that way may not always be best for me is irrelevant to what my ballot actually means. It is also irrelevant that my true preference might be A>C>B and that I'm voting tactically. I'm essentially lying on the ballot in that case. Voting A>B>C is a statement that that is your preference order even if it is not a true statement, or if it is a true statement but ends up giving a worse result for me. So
 it's clear to me what a ranked ballot means.

And as someone previously suggested, you can devise a partially random ranked system where honest voting is the best strategy, so this is nothing against ranked ballots per se anyway.

Also, while double range voting requires voters to use a specific meaning for what the scores mean in order to maximise their utility, I don't think that this is necessarily the same meaning that they'd use for a normal range voting election, so the meaning of a range ballot is arguably more voting-method-specific than a ranked ballot. I think double range works on affine scores, so scores of 10 and 0 for two candidates would be the same as 1 and 0, whereas this is not the case for ordinary range voting. This is a true difference of meaning rather than a strategical consideration. All ranked-ballot systems (ones that aren't simply absurd) have the same fundamental meaning for a ballot, even if strategical considerations can affect what people do in practice.

>>It would be very difficult for someone to
calculate/guess.

>--Sure, some people, or even more likely, some lower animals,
>may have trouble.  That's just a speculation unsupported by, and in
>fact flatly contradicted by, the actual evidence measuring e.g.
>elapsed time taken for range-style voters versus rank-order-style
>voters (the latter take longer, indicating more mental effort for rank
>ordering).

My point is that they won't necessarily be able to make a very good guess at the comparative utilities of the candidates. Voting more quickly doesn't mean they've calculated the utilities correctly.

>But the question here was not about what a naive uninformed guesser
>might think their mental effort would be; it was about the inherent
>presence or absence of meaning. And the person involved was not a
>lower animal, but in fact a Nobel prize winning expert on Voting, Ken
>Arrow, and another Nobelist, E.Maskin.

OK,  fair enough. But I think there's always room for tangential discussion. But also, since you argue that strategic considerations strip away meaning from ranked voting systems, the same would apply for normal range voting as well. And since normal range voting doesn't have the specific pinpoint meaning of the honest sub-ballot of double range voting in the first place coupled with the fact that different range methods can have different ballot meanings (as argued above), one could argue that there is a gap in meaning here.

>--the scores on honest-sub-ballots have a clear "meaning."  If you deny it,
>then find an example election in which voting any way other than honest
>expected utilities, helps that voter.  You cannot.
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