At 07:48 PM 12/20/2005, rob brown wrote: >I like this way better than "regular" range voting, as it removes a >large part of the incentive people have to vote insincerely. > >Still, a voter has to take a guess as to what vote will be most >effective in helping to achieve what he wants. Example: I vote A: >0, B: 55, C: 100. > >Then the final score comes out to be A: 56.001, B: 56, C: 45.
>Oops, my vote of 55 for B actually lowered his score, and in this >very tight race may have actually cost him the election. Not exactly. Yes, the vote for B lowered the median by a tiny fraction, but, unless this was quite a small town, probably not as much as .001. > My A and B votes effectively cancelled themselves out in the A-B > race, even though I much prefer B and would have liked to help > him. If I had watched the polls more closely, I would have given B > a higher score (anything over 57 would have done it), since C > turned out to be irrelevant anyway. You would presumably know enough to know that A was roughly as popular as B. (This is a *really* close election, they are not all that common.) You'd probably have seen polls that A and B were going to get in the range of the mid-fifties. So you did cut it close rating B as 55, if it was so important to you that B win. If you have strong preferences, with median Range -- though the method is not really well defined yet -- you might want to vote nearer the extremes, just to be safe. So your vote might have been A, 0; B: 80; C: 100. median Range much more resembles a ranked method. But I certainly have not worked out all the implications, nor am I confident at all that the method is sufficiently well defined for optimum performance. The latest thought, for example, is that the rating spectrum for a candidate would be normalized. I don't know yet whether or not that is a great idea or a fish bicycle. Probably the latter. Individual ratings might be normalized, which would have a stronger effect. Examples showing median Range to have problems, so far, have involved truncated ratings; i.e., the voters did not vote the full range; thus their preferences were weakened and it is thus made to appear that a majority-favored candidate lost to one with less preference. >Personally, I will never get behind a method that gives a >significant advantage to those voters that are better at guessing >who is likely to win, and this method does that (as does approval). This method does that far less than Approval. Mr. Brown and I differ on the philosophy behind elections, quite significantly. In my view, the ultimate "advantage" to the individual voter lies in the election of a candidate who has the broadest support. As an extreme, one may win the election and lose the insurrection. (With most insurrections, nearly everybody loses.) > People should only need to learn about candidates, not have to > fill their brains with strategy and polling data, IMO. > >Anyway, if you are gonna have Range voting, this way of figuring it >is a huge improvement in my opinion. The linear spread thing seems >to be a simple solution to the likelihood of ties problem. Don't >like it, but dislike it less. :) It *does* solve the problem of ties. But there are other aspects that need attention. I'm suspecting that normalizing all the votes may turn out to optimize the results. As a wild guess, it may make median range into a Condorcet-compliant method. Of course, there is the short-cut to Condorcet-compliance. The Range ballot is interpreted as a ranked ballot, and if there is a Condorcet winner, that is the winner. If there is a cycle, then the spread median Range winner among the members of the Smith set is the winner. And there is another option: if the spread median winner is not the Condorcet winner, then there is an actual runoff between the two. The costs of running runoff elections is greatly overstated, compared to the benefit of optimizing the satisfaction of the electorate in the outcome. If your candidate B loses to A in a 2-way race, presumably you would not regret so much having rated B almost exactly at the median. Or, indeed, if B wins. Your vote would certainly rank B above A in the Condorcet aspect of the election. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
