At 01:30 AM 11/7/2006, Chris Benham wrote: >Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: >90: A9>B1 (sincere is A9>B1) >10: B99>A0 (sincere is B5>A3) > >All the voters have a sincere low opinion of both candidates, but >90% think that A is 900% >better than B and yet B wins (with only 10% of the voters not being >"sincere and honest").
It is almost as if Chris said, there are 100 eligible voters. 90 of them stay home. 10 vote and the candidate they favor is elected. Chris has assumed that a sincere Range vote would be an absolute number. Range votes are *relative* (just like other votes, generally). There is no intrinsic meaning to 99 or 0, beyond saying that 99 is "the best" and 0 is "the worst." If voters do not choose a "best" and a "worst," i.e., vote 99 or 0 for at least one candidate each, they have cast a weak vote. Casting a maximum vote of 9 out of a possible 99 is like casting one-tenth of a vote. Range *allows* voters to cast weak votes. Ranked methods, including the simplest, plurality, don't allow weak votes. You either cast a full vote for a candidate (one only in the case of no-overvoting plurality) or no vote for that candidate. Ranked methods with more than two ranks break down into a series of pairwise elections, and, again, the vote in each pairwise election is either one vote for one side, or a vote for the other side, or an abstention. Range allows intermediate votes. It does not require them. You can vote Range as Approval, if you like, and the effect of your vote is as it would be in approval. The example given has 90% of the voters casting a weak vote. So of course they are outweighed by the 10% that cast votes at full strength. More silliness from Chris. >> >That rests on the false assumption that it is (significantly) more >bother to lie than to tell the truth. >In fact it seems to me to be less bother. I can well imagine being >sure that I prefer A to B but >not sure exactly what my honest rating of each is, so I'd find it >easier to vote A max. and B min. Fine. Chris has glossed over that the situation under consideration is that the voter prefers A to B, slightly, and both of them to C, substantially. So if the voter wants less bother, the voter can vote A and B with high ratings, perhaps the max, and C at minimum. Or the voter, knowing that he prefers A to B, can vote A at max and B at min. *And C at min.* This is a sincere vote. It is not a lie. Voters are not required to satisfy any definition of preference strength under Range. They may express what we might call a weak preference as strong, and they may, but are unlikely to do so, express a strong preference as weak (I see no reason why they would do this). Lying, in the meaning I was using would be to reverse the actual preference. I.e., we are talking about strategic voting, *not* merely voting Approval style. The voter prefers B to C, but prefers A to be and fears that B will win unless the voter ranks B at minimum. The lie is not that the voter ranks B at minimum, but that the voter then ranks C higher than B even though the preference is the opposite. I continue to be amazed at how Chris can generate these utterly spurious arguments. >We can certainly be sure majoritarian methods will outperform Range >in the worst-case scenarios. Provocative statement made with utterly no evidence presented. Further, when you've got an election methods expert, "worst-case scenarios" can mean completely impossible vote arrangements, carefully constrained to create an outrageous result with this or that election method. I don't put this beyond Chris at all. Just look at the Range example he gave above. 90% of the voters deliberately cast a strange vote. It is clear that Range, if not introduced gradually (which is what I personally recommend, i.e., starting with Approval), requires voter education. Even though the method is extremely simple, the consequences of not voting the full Range should be explicitly explained, so that voters don't remain unaware that this casts a weak vote. I would want all voters to know that they have the right to cast a full vote, and would want them to cast a weak vote only deliberately. Because they are accustomed to standard full-vote/no-vote systems, this may not be immediately obvious to some of them. The vast majority of them would be able to figure it out (it is simplest to understand if Range is counted as the sum of votes), but it should still be explicitly explained. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
