At 02:14 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote: >Let's say that in the U.S. presidential elections roughly 48% of the >voters vote D=9, R=7, PW=1 and roughly 48% vote R=9, D=7, PW=1. >Either D or R wins.
The premise is utterly insane and, quite simply, not reasonable. Range is difficult to analyze through the simplistic "this block voted this way" kind of analysis we are accustomed to using for election methods. What has been presented here is an extremely close election. Essentially, going into the election, it is a tossup who will win. Note that by the premises there are *no* voters whom I would call "Republican" or "Democrat" based on their votes. There are only swing voters, voters where their preference for either major party is weak. This bears utterly no resemblance to the real world. In the real world, there is a set of voters who are dedicated party supporters, and then there are other voters, perhaps the majority, who aren't so nailed to a party. A minority, perhaps, would vote as described. And, in fact, they are much more likely, I'd suggest, to rate a third party candidate higher. > In the next elections the Democrats notice the >possibility of strategic voting and advice their supporters to vote >D=9, R=0, PW=0. In these elections Democrats win. Again, we have a scenario in which there are no dedicated party supporters, as shown by the initial votes. Yet, somehow, these voters who really are on the fence (9 and 7 are both fairly strong votes for a candidate), will suddenly obey, as a block, party discipline and lie about their preferences in the next election. Remember, if they rated the candidates honestly, they were happy with either outcome, according to their votes. Where does the motivation come from to change this position? I'd say that it would happen only if there was massive dissatisfaction with a Republican winner. Further, note that the PW candidate now gets zero from this group. That's really not much different from the vote before. But it is totally unnecessary. Why would these voters suddenly drop their (small) support for the candidate with no chance to win? Remember, it's Range. They do not threaten a front-runner by rating a third party candidate or write-in higher than zero. If they voted as a massive block, and rated him higher than the median, maybe. But that, likewise, is quite unreasonable. Basically, the premise behind these analyses, and we have seen them many times regarding Range Voting, is that voters will express a weak preference and then be ... shocked, absolutely shocked! ... that their weak favorite is not elected. If they cared this much, why did they express such a weak preference? It's a contradiction, and it is blithely assumed as a condition of the analysis. Hence the analysis is next to worthless. It's about time that this be widely recognized. I can understand a newbie coming across with this kind of argument, but Juho is not a newbie. He should know better! Perhaps he was having a bad day.... > In the third >elections Republicans have learned a lesson and now recommend their >voters to vote R=9, D=0, PW=0. Now the election is in balance again, >but the method has in practice reduced to Approval (actually >Plurality in this example). Sure. But the premises are totally unrealistic. If you are going to propose that Range will *reduce* to Approval, you will have to use reasonably likely scenarios. It's fine, I'd suggest, to use simplified voting patterns rather than the complex distributions that would actually occur, but if you oversimplify them, and make it appear that there are, for example, only two or three voting patterns in a Range election, you then set up conditions to make it appear that Range has reduced to Approval. The fact is that if even the majority of voters bullet-vote, it has not reduced to Approval. What this means, in fact, is that, if the election is close, swing voters will decide it in a far more sophisticated way than happens in plurality, and without the spoiler effect. And if it *does*, under some difficult-to-anticipate circumstance, reduce to Approval, that isn't a bad outcome! >This strategy doesn't require the voters be rocket scientists. That is correct. It requires them to be mindless robots, voting as advised by party bosses. >Probably the strategies would not spread as described above. Duh! If this is "probably true," then why propose the scenario as reasonable in the first place? > Maybe >there just would be discussions between voters and in the media and >all parties would be impacted in roughly same speed. Or it would have no effect at all. In reality, party fanatics will probably bullet-vote from the outset. And, let me suggest to you that if a candidate advised voters to bullet vote instead of voting their honest opinions (in a context where this is not going to spoil an election), I'd consider that a strong disqualification. That candidate would have just lost my vote, because he or she does not understand democracy. And if the party advised this and the candidate did not disavow it, ditto. I take democracy seriously, and so do many others. > In competitive >elections it is quite possible that majority of voters would not stay >"sincere" but would vote in Approval style. Perhaps. But, by definition, this is a close election. And thus would be decided, quite likely, by the voters who *do* vote more refined range. If not, so what? > Once strategic voting >becomes wide enough to be meaningful to the end result, voting >sincerely could be commonly seen as "donating the victory to the >strategists". A key property of this evolution process is that those >parties and individuals that are strategic will have more voting >power than others (this breaks the possible balance of having same >percentage of strategic voters in each party). What is being done here is to extrapolate from an unlikely scenario to a vision of the future, as if that future were likely. It is stated as if it were fact. We do not in fact know how voters will vote in public elections using Range. Warren is about the only person who has done research on this, and his results, albeit constrained by the obvious limitations of his study, indicate that voters will, at the outset, vote sincerely. There is about to be, we think, more information coming from the French elections, where it seems there is Range exit polling taking place. But that is still polling. Most of us think that Approval is an excellent first reform. Simple, cheap, and fixes the first-order spoiler effect. We don't know precisely how the electorate will use it, but the most likely initial effect would be that voting would continue about the same as today for most major-party supporters. However, those who are sympathetic to a third party may start to approve third-party candidates as well. Those whose preference is a third party will, in greater numbers, vote for the candidate of that party plus their favorite among the frontrunners. Thus, perhaps, only a small number of votes will shift. But, quite often, a crucial number of votes. We can expect an improvement in outcomes if we simply stop tossing overvotes. Which was a bad idea before its time, rooted in a very old error. So, if somewhere Range is tried, and it turns out to reduce to Approval, big whoop! Why this is advanced as an argument against Range is beyond me. Particularly if the Range method is low-resolution, such as Range 3. Range 2, of course, is Approval. >I think the size of the election doesn't influence much on if voters >become strategic. I think it is more like a balance of media / yellow >press interest, strength of rumours, overall requirement of "good >moral" in the society, and (maybe most importantly) the level of >competitiveness in the elections in question. I agree with most of this, however, I think that the competitiveness of the election may have far less effect than Juho predicts. Most voters are *not* party partisans! They tend to prefer one party or the other, but a huge number, if you ask them, will describe themselves as independent. If a party starts trying to tell these voters what to do, it seriously risks losing their support! No, voters will bullet vote if they have a serious preference, and they aren't interested in any third party candidate at all. So? (It can easily be argued that the optimum Range vote, if the voter wants to amplify his effect to the maximum -- not all voters really care about this -- is to rate your favorite among the front-runners at max rating, the other front-runner at zero, and then other candidates as they fall, it is mostly moot. If it is high-resolution Range, like Range 100, or Range -10 to +10, which is quite detailed, really, then you might slip the favorite frontrunner a notch if you like, the effect, in Range 21, would be one-twentieth of a vote lost to the favorite frontrunner. I recommend, instead, that Range methods allow the specification of a Favorite, which is not used to determine the winner. Except perhaps in a tie.... Favorite, instead, would be used for ballot position, campaign funding, and for just plain understanding how the voters stand. There are other ways that Range could be structured, as well.) I have also suggested that if the analysis of Range ballots shows divergence between the Range winner and a Condorcet winner, a runoff be held between the two. Some, seeing this, imagine that the outcome of the runoff would be that the Condorcet winner would prevail. If true, that's fine with me. However, it is much more likely to occur that the voting public would take into account how everyone else voted, and *might* vote to, instead, elect the Range winner. After all, that is the winner who, the poll indicated, would maximize voter satisfaction. How important is that to *you*? Would you prefer to "win" if the winner made (almost) half the population serious unhappy, and there was another winner who would make *everyone* happy, and yourself *almost* as happy? To me, and to many voters, I submit, the answer is obvious. Even if I bullet-voted for the Condorcet winner in the full Range election. To repeat it, what the kind of analysis of Range that Juho presented does is to make two contradictory assumptions: voters don't really care that much which of two candidates wins, and they will be seriously unhappy if one of them wins. If they cared that much, why in the world didn't they express that in their vote? ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
