One person's theory about how to interpret rankings, let alone how to count them after interpreting them, can be incomprehensible to another person. That strongly underlines a big advantage of Approval: There's only one way to interpret the Approval votes, and there's only one way to count them: Add them up. But, about the truncated rankings, Demorep, I don't understand what the problem is. The voter who votes a short ranking is still ranking some candidates over others, and those pairwise preferences that he has expressed should be counted. I think you're making it more complicated than it is. But there's another issue about truncated rankings: I've always felt that the voter who votes a short ranking wants to be understood as voting every candidate he's ranked over every candidate he's not ranked. But maybe not always. Maybe you rank the main contenders, against eachother, but you don't want to take the time to rank all the less winnable candidates whom you consider it less important to rank. You _don't_ want your ranking to be interpreted as saying that your lowest ranked candidate is better than everyone whom you didn't rank. On the other hand, maybe you only rank a few candidates because you want to say that they're better than all the others. It seems clear that both interpretations would be wanted by some votes. So the voter should be able to indicate which he wants. The question is, though: Which should be the default interpretation? I recently proposed a Presidential poll on a newsgroup. I said that, though Nader, Gore, Bush, Browne & Buchannan are the obvious candidates, one should feel free to rank anyone else too, including demos & repubs who lost the primaries. Then I gave my ranking, which was: 1. Nader 2. Gore 3. Browne 4. Bush 5. Buchannan Only afterwards did it occur to me that I'd said with my ranking that Buchannan is better than McCain and Bradley, etc.--that ranking of course should be interpreted as only a comparison of its ranked candidates. So obviously the voter should be able to choose which interpretation he wants--but which should be the default interpretation? Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
