On Nov 7, 2009, at 12:12 PM, Matthew Welland wrote:
It seems to me that approval and range voting eliminate most of the
strategic opportunity in single winner elections and the marginal
improvement of other methods is fairly small. Can anyone point me to
analysis, preferably at a layman level, that contradicts or supports
this
assertion?
Or, in succinct terms, what are the strategic flaws in approval or
range
voting?
Voting in either one is fundamentally strategic.
Take the simple case of casting an approval ballot with three
candidates where your ordinal preference is A>B>C. Obviously you vote
for A and not for C. The strategic question is whether you vote for B.
Voting for B might cause B to beat A, but on the other hand it could
cause B to beat C (depending of course on the other voters).
Presumably your decision to vote for B or not will be driven by your
best guess as to which of those is more likely, and might also be
influenced by whether your preference is more like A>>B>C or A>B>>C.
The closer you are to A=B>C or A>B=C (and the better your information
about other voters, say from pre-election polling), the easier that
decision might be, but it's a strategic decision.
I suppose that I end up more or less in the same came as RB-J, except
that I (mildly) prefer STV to Condorcet methods. In either of those,
it's easy to cast a sincere ballot, and it's usually a good, or at
least acceptable, strategy to do that. With approval or range, you
don't really have that option: every ballot is inherently a strategic
one.
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