>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? >Thanks, Matthew Welland
--well... there is the whole rangevoting.org website... my more-recent papers at math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html discuss range voting including some ways it is provably better than every rank-order voting system for either honest or strategic voters... --but those are not exactly "succinct"... OK Let me try: 1. Range for 100% honest voters behaves better than IRV, Borda, Condorcet and it is pretty intuitively clear why -- strength of preference info used, not discarded. 2. For 100% strategic voters Borda is a total disaster as is also pretty obvious... far worse than approval voting... but range voting just degenerates basically to approval voting, which still works pretty well since, e.g. it obeys the "favorite betrayal criterion." If the strategic voters use "I'll exaggerate on the top two" naive strategy (which in fact, in the real world, they pretty much do) then Condorcet and IRV both degenerate to strategic plurality voting, which is pretty obviously worse than approval voting, so range beats them. For Condorcet systems with ranking-equalities allowed, they might behave better with strategic voters, though. I've posted on that topic before. 3. The main perceived flaw in range voting is for strategic+honest voter MIXTURES and under the worrying assumption that who decides to be strategic, is CORRELATED with the politics of that voter. Thus for example, strategic Bush voters could beat unstrategic Gore voters. Problem isn't really much of a problem if the Bush strategy-fraction is the same as the Gore strategy fraction (a claim backed up by computer sims). It is only if they differ. 4. I'm unaware of any evidence from the real world that Bushy and Gorey voters really are any different strategically with range voting. However, there is evidence that Nader voters are less strategic and more honest. (Not surprisingly since voting Nader in the USA *was* unstrategic.) However, the evidence from the real world is that all political types of range voters are substantially honest, i.e.only a small fraction vote approval-style, and this causes Nader, despite this relative disadvantage, to do a lot better with range voting than he does with approval voting. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
