> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [EM] Is range voting the panacea we need?
> To: [email protected]
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> Will someone on the list who has studied range voting and compared it to
> Condorcet, approval, and other methods please comment on Doug Greene's
> paper? He appears to be saying that range voting is superior to all other
> single
> winner methods. Are there good arguments against this conclusion? Does range
> voting have serious flaws? If so, could someone briefly summarize them?
> Thanks,
> Ralph Suter
--Reply: I am one of Greene's coauthors.
There are senses in which range voting is superior, perhaps not to all,
but certainly to all the common, single-winner voting methods.
To learn about that, see my 2000 "range voting" paper
and associated material at
http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html #56.
The senses of superiority are both theoretical, and experimental
via computer simulations of millions of elections. I personally
find the computer evidence more convincing than theoretical reasoning.
Specifically, computer shows range voting has smaller "Bayesian regret"
than all other
voting methods I tried, robustly across a very large number of different
scenarios,
different numbers of voters, numbers of candidates, honesty/strategy
behavior of voters, ignorance/knowledge of voters, different "utility
generators", etc. Bayesian regret is argued to be clearly the uniquely
best
statistical yardstick for measuring single winner voting system quality.
Warning: this 2000 paper is not perfect and I am planning on revising
it,
including some rewrites and fixes of the theoretical parts and
updating the computer study to include even more voting systems,
including
many discussed on "election-methods". (If anybody wants to help, let
me know...) I have in fact already partially done that and so far the
conclusion
of range's superiority has not altered.
The present 2004 paper by Smith, Quintal and Greene is about a
real-world
study involving human voters. It learned some real-world lessons
about range and approval and other voting and is recommedned reading as
a
sanity check for those of you who may be getting a bit too theoretical.
--
Warren D. Smith
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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