The stalemate continues. In the meantime here is a pro-range argument. I'm not going to bother to quote ones from CRV. Those have probably all been discussed ad infinitum.
Impacts of strategic voting: Ballot compression is less worrisome than offensive order reversal. There scenarios under which reversing Range Voting pseudopreferences is strategic are few and far between. This could conceivably occur if two sets of clones are competing, you don't know who is winning but you prefer one member of each set to the other member of that set. In that rare case, it may well be worth your while. This is hardly normal behvaior of the system though so let me suffice it to say that for the most part the direction of the comparisons on a Range ballot are sincere. This means that the information transmitted by strategic range voters might be more vague but is rarely dishonest. Next, this will only occur if voters have a strong X is much better than all non-X mentality. If they do have such a mentality it is probably not best that they be forced to compromise. Condorcet method strategizing, I would argue, is more destructive. The closest thing to backfiring under normal Range scenarios is losing the opportunity to pick between the other candidates. In Condorcet backfiring is more catastrophic as fodder candidates used to bury a popular rival can be elected directly by your vote. The distinction is important because in Condorcet your vote is more likely to actually cause harm if strategic voting is attempted as opposed to merely forfeiting one's opportunity to select among rival candidates. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
