At 09:47 AM 12/25/2007, Kevin Venzke wrote: > > [...] Range, voted with full strategic > > effect, reduces to Approval Voting, which may reduce to bullet > > voting. It *still* is not Plurality, because it only takes a few > > percent of voters adding multiple votes to eliminate the spoiler effect. > >So you say that if Range is not quite as bad as Plurality, then that's "as >well as hoped" for Range? I think most Range advocates have higher hopes.
No. But I can understand why Mr. Venzke would think that's my position. When a writer writes something that, without careful reading, can be interpreted to confirm some stereotype, it's very easy to overlook contradictory details. Further, an extension of the Wikipedia principle of Assume Good Faith, which is to assume that a writer is actually saying something of interest, would require not being satisfied with a shallow and meaningless interpretation. Read what I wrote. I described what happens under certain conditions, the *worst* case. And then I noted that a few voters voting other than Plurality style are enough to solve the number one problem with Plurality. That's not shabby, particularly for Approval, which accomplishes this at no cost, merely starting to do what should have been a no-brainer from the beginning. It's the elephant in the living room, we never noticed, thought he was part of the furniture. I did a study of strategic voting in Range 3, using some simple assumptions: three candidates, many voters, utilities for the voter of 1.0, 0.5, 0, and zero knowledge. Turns out that the sincere vote utility is equal to the "strategic vote" utility in that case, which is the same whether the voter votes (1,0,0), or (1,1,0). The claim that bullet voting is higher utility is not correct, it depends. *Accurate* sincere voting is on a par, at least, with "strategic voting," but there were different implications. The exaggerated vote resulted, as one might predict, in more wins for the favorite. But it also resulted in more wins for the least-favored. The sincere vote was less variable in result. There was another interesting result from that study: if we take the Range election, with equal expected outcome for both the sincere vote and the strategic vote, and make it an Approval election, i.e., restrict the set of legal votes to the Approval style votes, the expected outcome *declines.* The existence of even one voter who votes intermediate causes the entire vote distribution to dither, increasing accuracy, at least that's my theory of why this occurred. (More study is needed to confirm this; Warren Smith did co-author a page on it at rangevoting.org, so I think the math is sound; but the implications of converting to pure Approval have not been confirmed.) However, first things first. While Range may be theoretically superior, Approval does improve results quite a bit in the simulations, and it is blatantly obvious why. Approval is free, just Count All the Votes. In the ranked form, Bucklin, it was used fairly widely in the U.S. at one time, though before the living memory of nearly everyone. Consider this an election, and electability is important. The candidates are Plurality, IRV, Approval, Range, Condorcet. How would we vote in this election, held right now, assuming some level of public education in the campaign? How should the election be held? What method should be used? The Range Voting people are *all*, to my knowledge, supporting Approval at this time. While CRV is doing a level of educational effort regarding Range, it's Approval which is seeing real advocacy. It has a solid history of academic study. It's significant enough that FairVote is putting some considerable effort into finding ways to attack it. Simple, cheap, easy to understand, strategy very simple, no surprises, solves the spoiler problem, but has no center squeeze effect. Center squeeze is not important in a two-party system, but what if election reform lives up to the sometimes-implied promise that it helps third parties gain a toehold? >Your claim that strategic Range voters are actually sincere is not >different from choosing to believe that the Plurality winner is always the >favorite candidate of the most voters. I'm disappointed. Mr. Venzke, I've seen much better analysis from you. Look again. In Range, there is no strategic advantage, ever, to reverse expressed preference from real preference. The so-called "insincere" vote in Range is simply a non-linear squeeze of the internal utilities, or another way to put it, the internal absolute utilities are normalized, first -- nearly everyone will do that, since an election is a choice, and choices are almost automatically normalized -- then the scale is expanded depending on two factors: expectations of how the electorate as a whole is likely to vote, and the effort the voter is willing to put into determining how to vote. Approval-style voting is relatively easy, and a lot of voters are going to do just that. In Plurality, by contrast, strategic voting requires preference reversal, as with all ranked methods where equal ranking is not allowed. It's simpler to see with Approval. I claim that a sincere vote in Approval is a vote which divides candidates into two sets: Approved and Not Approved. There is no reason for a voter to insincerely vote (other than through misunderstanding the implications, and they are pretty simple); an insincere vote would be voting for a candidate when another candidate preferred over him or her does not get a vote. What most voters will do with Approval is to vote for their favorite, first. They will also vote, most of them, for their preferred frontrunner, since all other votes are likely to be moot. And then, if they understand the system, they will likewise vote for any other candidates they also prefer to the frontrunner they voted for. But those third votes will be rare, and, practically by definition, in a two-party system, most voters would vote for only one. Range is obviously more complex to vote, but the basic principles are the same. I'd expect nearly all voters, once Range is understood, to vote the extremes for at least one candidate each. It's been argued that votes should be normalized, to correct for weak votes, on the theory that these were due to voter ignorance. Indeed, that was a proposal of mine. I later came to think it was a bad idea. Voters voting weak opinions *when they really do not have a strong preference and choose to partially abstain* actually improves outcome. It's easy to see why. Under Plurality, voters who don't care which of the frontrunners wins current may choose not to vote, or just don't go to the trouble. There is lots of handwringing over this, but, in fact it improves outcome over introducing noise. In face-to-face meetings, people who don't care about the outcome of a vote, they could accept either result, often abstain. As they should. > Essentially Range comes with a >suggestion on how to rate candidates, that isn't motivated by the method's >incentives. And then no matter how people vote, you choose to interpret >that they followed the suggestion. What suggestion does Range "come with"? First of all, Center for Range Voting, mostly put together by a mathematician, is not an authority on ballot instructions. Range voting is exactly equivalent to allowing fractional votes in an Approval election. Current ballot instructions say *nothing* about how to choose who to vote for. They do not say, "Vote for your Favorite," they certainly do not say, "Vote for your favored frontrunner." Approval ballots will not say, "Vote for all candidates you approve." If the ballots are as I would argue, they should merely describe what votes are legal and how the outcome will be determined, which is very, very simple with Range. Again, it is Just Count All the Votes. Candidate with the most votes wins. I must say, though, that I don't understand Venzke's last comment, it refers to more than one unspecified abstraction: the "suggestion on how to rate candidates," the "method's incentives," and, further, some "choice to interpret." We add up the votes, we don't "interpret" them. (In my opinion, that's best; the 'official' CRV recommendation is still average vote, which introduces a whole can of wormy complications for no real benefit, and the simulations utterly neglect this as far as I know, it's just an opinion that got stuck in there.) Approval instruction: Vote for all candidates you choose to support; the winner will be the candidate with the most votes. Range instruction (Range 3, +/-): For each candidate, mark Yes or No or leave the boxes blank. The candidate with the highest result, after No votes are subtracted from Yes votes, will win. A blank vote will not affect the total. (This is Range 3, the three possible votes are -1, 0, +1; the default vote pulls the average toward the center. However, it is also possible that there would be an explicit zero, and that average result would be used. I don't care to debate this, at this time, there is plenty of time. If we can't get Approval, Range is really pie in the sky.) Other possible instructions can be written for higher Range implementations and different treatment of abstentions; my own opinion probably that candidate abstentions should be treated as minimum rating, not mid rating, but this all really needs further study. Range Voting, at least under that name, was invented by a mathematician, not a political scientist. The description of Range in terms of the *meaning* of the vote, aside from the real political meaning, is a red herring. Votes are actions, not sentiments. Sentiment is something that the voter uses and integrates with the voter's opinion of what is possible, sometimes, to decide how to act, but behind a single action may be quite different intentions. To cover one more matter again: the application of the Majority Criterion to Approval depends on a quite problematic definition of "sincere vote," and James Armytage-Green struggles mightily with the problem on his page on this criterion. What he really ends up with, though he doesn't say it explicitly, is a definition of sincere vote in Approval as being not not sincere. Yes, double negative. Is it insincere to say that the set of candidates A, B is preferred to the set of candidates, C, D, if the voter has a preference between A and B? Of course not. It is not full disclosure of preference, that is all. To make Approval fail the Majority Criterion -- there seems to be a strong intuition that it fails, and so a lot of effort into manipulating the definition so that it, indeed, fails, which makes mincemeat of the use of election criteria for objective judgement -- one must posit an internal preference that is not expressed, and, then, of course, if a preference is not expressed, it cannot be considered by the method and so the majority preference may fail to win. However, *any preference not expressed* can cause MC failure, and Plurality, as an example, is generally considered to pass MC. With Plurality, then, the criterion requires a "sincere vote." Which with plurality requires preference reversal, i.e., the voter prefers a candidate that the voter did not rank first. However, with Approval, the voter may rank the favorite first, there is no motive not to do so. The question is about additional approvals. If the majority chooses not to express its preference *exclusively*, then, of course, it can fail to elect its favorite. How do we describe this vote? Is it sincere? In the ordinary meaning, of course it is, there is no reason to presume otherwise. However, "sincere vote" is used technically in the Criterion. What does it mean? The original Majority Criterion that I could find simply referred to the voter's "preference list." It did not address unexpressed preferences, it was written for ranked methods, and seems to have assumed that full ranking was allowed. If a majority strictly prefers one candidate over all others, that candidate must prevail. But unwritten was that the majority must express the preference. If a majority strictly prefers one candidate over all others, and expresses that preference, that candidate must prevail. Approval passes this criterion. Some have argued that defining the criterion this way makes it useless, but that's not true. Range does not pass the criterion, because "prefer" has no strength; a majority may have a weak preference which is overcome by a strong preference of a minority. However, real world: It is certainly true that, with Approval, it could occur that the preference of a majority fails to be elected, if the majority adds votes which essentially cancel out the expression of this preference. But what has long been overlooked is that the situation in which this would happen would be extraordinarily rare under present conditions. We should be so luck as to see multiple majorities, which is what it takes! How often would voters vote for both frontrunners? I'd say, let's work for Approval and see how it plays out. Then some experimentation with fractional votes. The cost of both of these is well under the cost of implementing ranked methods; Approval is essentially free. Did I mention that it as simple as: Just Count All the Votes. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info