At 03:23 AM 7/30/2006, Dave Ketchum wrote: >Agreed that for a special election for filling one office, ten levers >could be used for each candidate - but who cares. General elections are >what counts.
What is commonly overlooked in these discussions is that Range is a method of vote counting. The resolution is actually a detail. As has often been stated, Approval is a kind of Range Voting method: it is counted in a way that is exactly equivalent; blank equals Range zero and a mark equals Range one. The votes for each candidate are totalled and the candidate with the highest total count wins. Extending this by adding one more possible vote could actually give 90% of the Range buck at only a small cost in ballot space. Basically, the vote for each candidate becomes trinary instead of binary. The way that I would configure it would be that blank would be 0.5. Each candidate would be listed on the ballot as if he or she were a question, with Yes and No options. No would be zero and Yes would be one. Pursuing discussions that have taken place on the Range list, to avoid the election of an unknown candidate, a special rule would require the winner to have a certain minimum level of Yes votes. This is still Range. Range 3, as we usually measure, Approval being Range 2. >Our many columns and rows seems like a lot, til you try to arrange a >ballot neatly. Cannot be done if there are enough candidates and enough >offices. So you squeeze - has happened that a loser went to court >complaining that he lost because of the poor quality of the squeezing. The same problem exists, of course, in any election with too many candidates. I agree that it is a problem, but it is a technical problem rather easily soluble. The core of it is the inflexibility of voting machines, which, in my view, were a bad idea before their time. Voting machines make sense when a vote total must be available immediately, as in an assembly where every member has an electronic device for entering a vote. But for counting public elections, they open the door to undetectable fraud, and the cost of counting a public election by hand is only a small fraction of the real cost of the election, which mostly consists of the labor invested by voters. >So, the RV promoters would have us install extra voting machines. Well, I'm not exactly an RV promoter, but I do agree that RV deserves careful consideration. As I have written elsewhere, RV is actually an optimal decision-making system, compatible with game theory, translated into a voting method. I have a sense that the strategic voting considerations often proposed as arguments against Range are a red herring. It has been said that hard-core partisans will bullet-vote, and it seems to be an assumption that this is harmful. However, if we normalize the vote, as I did in the examples above, where the most-positive vote is one and the most-negative vote is zero, the most that any voter can give to any candidate is one vote. So a bullet voter gives one full vote to the favorite and nothing to any other candidate. Yet every other voter (who fully votes, i.e., gives maximum rating to at least one candidate) contributes the same full vote to his or her favorite(s). So all the bullet-voter has done is to abstain from all contests not involving his or her favorite. This is a loss of power for that voter; my sense is that the loss of power is more significant than the alleged gain by refusing to contribute to the totals for non-favorite candidates. In the end, I think the math would show that the expected outcome for each voter is maximized if the voter votes sincerely, that is, if the voter assigns expected election values to each candidate. If the voter really thinks that all candidates but the favorite are equally bad, then the voter is certainly free to so vote. > No >sale, for then there would be trouble making sure all the voters got to >all the machines. Again, this is a voting machine problem, a very strong argument for going back to paper ballots, particularly paper ballots that can be scanned. Since the equipment necessary for scanning is lying about, essentially free, the conversion cost would be minimal. Note that voters are already able to cast paper ballots, since I presume they don't mail out the machines to absentee voters..... As I've written many times, voting machines were a bad idea from the beginning. If a voting machine could not handle, say, two or three positions per candidate, then it was already primed to have difficulty with just about any electoral reform, since most of the proposed reforms give more opportunity for additional candidates to run without damaging outcomes, so we can expect candidate counts to increase. The voting machine argument, in the end, is against just about all election method reform, not just Range. It inhibits IRV or any Condorcet method that allows more than two ranks. (Condorcet reduces to Approval if only two ranks are allowed.) >HAVA is demanding new voting machines. With proper planning and >procurement these could have whatever capabilities are useful. The proposals -- and laws -- for new machines just about drive me crazy. Paper ballots are cheap, can be scanned with cheap or free equipment, and provide inherent audit trail. However, they don't make the mfrs of voting machines rich, and there is no paper-ballot lobby, nor a significant pencil lobby, nor will there be until voters wake up and realize that the system is eating their lunch. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
