On May 5, 2010, at 8:29 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On May 5, 2010, at 12:22 PM, Juho wrote:
In the pairwise comparison based methods we must also take into
account the fact that we do not measure the strength of personal
preferences, and therefore the decisions that we make are often
simplified assumptions (i.e. one set of votes may refers to a wide
range of different possible sincere preference strengths).
isn't there a fundamental reason for this, Juho? at least in the
political realm where disparate ideas are competing for influence
and power? imagine a simple election between two candidates with
Range or Score Voting. who will voluntarily dilute their vote and
not score their preferred candidate with the full 99 points (and the
other candidate with 0)? citizens with franchise consider
themselves equal to each other with equal effect and the right to
representation in a democratic government. this is one reason why i
usually say that the Range ballot requires too much information from
the voter (the other reason is requiring to voter to agonize over
whether he/she thinks some candidate is worth a grade of 46 or 51 or
60, they may as well just get out their dart board). if i like
Candidate A over Candidate B by just a little, and you like
Candidate B over Candidate A by a great amount, why would i dilute
my political preference to serve your political interest? why
*should* i? i want to count (even with my tepid preference) just as
much as you count.
Yes. We may get more distorted information if we try to collect more
information. It may be difficult for the voter to decide whether to
vote sincerely 61-65-77 or 61-65-78, or to exaggerate 0-25-99 or to
vote strategically 0-0-99 or 0-99-99. And we may lose even the amount
of information that we would have gotten with rankings. The voters may
face a strategic dilemma that leads to unpredictable results. And in
general the atmosphere gets worse because of widespread strategic
voting. In competitive elections rankings offer a simpler, more
sincere and well working alternative. In some non-competitive
elections and polls ratings may be the best choice ((as the primary
information to determine the outcome)).
and the Approval ballot asks for too little information from the
voter and immediately presents the voter with a tactical dilemma if
he/she likes a particular candidate but approves of more. in my own
State Senate district in Vermont, we *nearly* have Approval voting
(we vote for at most 6 out of maybe 20 candidates and the 6 highest
vote getters win state senate seats) and i have to consider each
election how many candidates i will actually vote for. i think
human behavior will eventually drive Approval voting into the FPTP
gutter.
Yes.
the Ranked-order ballot, what is used for IRV or Condorcet or Borda,
requires precisely the right amount of information from the voter:
who, between any pair of candidates, do you prefer? it does not ask
how *much* you prefer one over the other, and i think that such is a
useless question.
Yes, in competitive elections that is the appropriate level. As I
already noted in some non-competitive elections one could try to
collect also more detailed information. Then we would probably make
also the assumption that majority rule no longer applies but we would
look at the sum of utilities, the worst utilities, nice distribution
of utilities or something like that.
sorry if i took this off-topic.
I think this is very much on-topic.
BTW, Juho, i heard a BBC news story about your election tomorrow
regarding the desirability of FPTP vs. proportional methods in
electing Parliament.
James Gilmour already took the ball. I don't have strong links to UK
although my email address is from that domain :-).
so it sounds like that the UK, with its new Lib-Dem party, is also
being confronted by the same problems. i don't quite get it,
though. aren't MPs elected out of geographic districts? are there
more than one MP elected in any given district? if it's only one MP
per district, how can a proportional method be used? how can the
losing votes in one district be transferred to another district to
help elect someone there? you would *have* to have more than one
candidate elected per district with all candidates running at large,
no? if it's one MP per district, it's a single-winner election (and
then, of course, i would advocate for Condorcet, in a 3+ party
context).
It is also possible that withe FPTP and single-member districts we
could have more than two stable parties since in different parts of
the country the two leading parties (that the method favours) could be
different.
Juho
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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