> rob brown Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 11:17 PM
> >From a purely utilitarian point of view (i.e. "greatest
> happiness"), it makes a lot of sense to give more weight to
> the opinions of those who feel more strongly. But common
> sense tells us why this is a bad idea.
By "common sense" I presume you mean, in the context of elections, that it is fundamentally undemocratic.
Not sure that's really what I meant, because it all depends on the definition of "democratic" and don't think I want to go there. :) I suppose its unfair, but even that is debatable. More importantly it's not practical, because any rational person with an IQ over 50 would vote insincerely, so the system would quickly break down.
All i meant by "common sense" is that almost anyone, with little or no education in voting theory, can see why it would be unwise to have an election take into account a voluntary assignment of "how much do you want your vote to count?".
I think this circle can be squared, if you normalise the responses so that each respondent contributes equally to the
determination of the result. That is democratic ("one person, one vote") but still allows those who wish,
to show the
relative strengths of the preferences they express. Brian Meek, inventor of Meek STV, described such a system for
normalising weighted preferences in multi-winner elections.
Is that possible if you only have one question on the poll?
Certainly if you have a bunch of separate questions on the ballot, you could allow voters to weight them relative to each other and that would make sense. Of course, strategy would quickly come into play, because voters would be smart to apply the most weight to things that they think they are likelier to make a difference on. Maybe there could be a system that could allow you to express things sincerely and it would tabulate in such a way that your vote was spent the most wisely.......and then, you'd have something roughly analogous to what Condorcet does to minimize strategic voting, right?
Regardless, I used a simple "single question" poll in the example for a reason, to keep it simple and, I thought, relevant. In a single winner/multi-candidate election, the only place I can see weighting come in is if there are multiple elections elections on the ballot, i.e. multiple offices being filled with different sets of candidates running for each.
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