It has been claimed that Range Voting might be an easier sell than Approval as a voting reform, which could be true. And I understand that some Range advocates see the fact that many voters would vote sincerely as a good thing. But since strategic voters would have more power in a Range election and might be seen as "cheaters" by the sincere voters, I think there would likely be a public demand for restrictions on voting candidates at the extremes, turning Range into something more like Borda.
When I advised the Free State Project (www.freestateproject.org) on voting systems for their choose-the-state-to-move-to election, they initially wanted to use cumulative voting. I managed to convince them that cumulative reduces to plurality when voters are strategic, but then they offered to add restrictions such as "you can't give more than half of your votes to any one candidate", which would make the system worse. I believe restrictions for Range Voting such as "you can't give any two candidates the same rating" (when the number of allowed ratings is finite and fairly small) would be intuitively appealing to many voters who would like to vote sincerely and want to force others to do so. Approval Voting makes it obvious that it is natural and acceptable to vote at the extremes and so would offer no such temptation to tinker with the system. How could Approval be tinkered with after adoption? Although I see it as unlikely, some voters might want to limit the number of allowed approvals. But allowing n approvals in a race would allow n + 1 parties to compete fairly in that race, which is still a strict improvement over plurality. ===== Rob LeGrand, psephologist [EMAIL PROTECTED] Citizens for Approval Voting http://www.approvalvoting.org/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
