OK, the hopefully-final version of my "Left-middle-right 3-candidate scenario" paper, which attempts an exhaustive computer simulation of essentially all such scenarios, is now available at http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html #95.
It concludes that range voting is clearly the best voting method among all tried (and in the situations tried, a heck of a lot of proposed voting methods are equvalent to simpler ones which we do try). Surprisingly, it is found that a 50-50 mixture of "near-honest" and "strategic" range voters (the latter are the same as approval voters) actually produces (in our scenarios) BETTER performance than either ingredient of that mix alone. This 50-50 mix is believed, based on experience exit-polling real human range voters, to be a pretty good approximation of reality. The complete computer program used to carry this out is downloadable and since all arithmetic is exact (no roundoff errors) and there is no use of randomness, all results should be exactly reproducible. Warren D. Smith http://www.RangeVoting.org ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
