[EM] Yes/?/No

[Toby Pereira]

 As others have also discussed, you can give scores based on your intensity of preference. E.g. I like A a bit more than B but I like B a lot more than C. And Forest has discussed how you can use an imagined lottery to determine what honest score you should give to each candidate. Sure, that might sound a bit complicated, but I don't think that e.g. Amazon users generally have too much problem in giving a star rating to the products they buy, or that they would consider it to be automatically a tactical vote.
I don't think a voter will forget who their second favourite is, but I did say rated ballots become easier when there are more than a handful of candidates. Second place isn't normally too hard. I don't think an Amazon user would find it harder to decide to give two or three stars than to decide whether the product they've bought is the 8th or 9th best thing they've bought from the site.
See here https://www.rangevoting.org/RateScaleResearch.html for a discussion for rated v ranked. You can skip to the subheading "Rating is superior to Ranking".
Toby

    On Sunday, 8 November 2020, 02:58:30 GMT, robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:  
 
 
> On 11/07/2020 5:38 PM Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> Approval voting can also just be seen as scores out of 1.

yes.  Approval Voting and Score Voting are both cardinal instead of ordinal.

> So unless score voting is automatically tactical, then approval isn't either.
> 

But Score Voting *is* automatically tactical if there are more than two candidates in the race.  Without tactical considerations, what score should a voter assign to their second preference candidate?

> And for more than a handful of candidates, rating becomes easier than ranking,

No, it's not.  That appears to be a claim offered with no evidence to support it.  It's like that perhaps it was just made up.

> even if your method then converts the scores to ranks (as long as ties are permitted). It would be really awkward to be ranking a load of candidates only to find you'd missed one out of the order.
> 

And that's your reason why the ranked ballot is deprecated??!  That the voter will forget who their second choice is and will have marked someone else as their second choice and now has to squeeze their real second choice somewhere between first and second?  Or get a new ballot and fill it out again?

It's ridiculous.

> 
> On Saturday, 7 November 2020, 06:35:24 GMT, Andy Jennings <elections at jenningsstory.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 6:34 PM robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> > 
> >  > On 10/31/2020 9:03 PM Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu> wrote:
> >  > 
> >  > 
> >  > Approval is one of the easiest election methods to explain and to understand; the ballots are identical to traditional FPP ballots except the instructions now say to mark the names of all of the candidates that you like instead of only one of them. As before the winner is the candidate with the greatest number of likes.
> >  > 
> >  > But what about the candidates that you just like a little bit? Do you include them or not? Where do you draw the line between like and not like?
> >  > 
> >  
> >  i've been trying for a couple years to get the Election Science people to answer that simple question. should a voter approve of their second choice or not? there is no simple answer and the voter is burdened with the task of tactical voting.
> > 
> >  
> 
> Approve your favorite. Disapprove your least-favorite.
> 

Disapprove is no different than not approving.  Approve (mark) your favorite.  Leave your least favorite unmarked (which is as "disapproved" you can mark them).  What do you do with your second choice?  Or any other candidate that you hate less than your least-favorite?


> Now imagine if the decision were between just those two, and it was being decided with a coin flip.
> 

Are you serious?  You are suggesting that a voter literally flip a coin on each candidate that is neither their favorite nor their hated?  That's not tactical voting?

> For each of the others, would you rather have them win or take the chance on the coin flip between your most-favored candidate and your least-favored candidate?
> 
> If you would prefer that candidate to the coin flip, then approve them. If you'd rather take your chances with the coin flip, then disapprove them.
> 

It's ridiculous to ask or to require voters to do that.  What a cognitive burden to place on voters to represent their interests faithfully.  If they cannot grok this tactical thinking, then they get to wonder (or fear) if they harmed their favorite or if they helped a candidate they dislike get elected.

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com 

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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