Jameson Quinn wrote:
How hard it is to vote in each system is an empirical, not a theoretical system. The evidence is pretty clear that it is easier for most people to rate candidates on an absolute scale - whether numeric or verbal - rather than ranking them relative to each other. That is true despite the fact that it is illogical, that in some sense it should be easier to give a ranked vote which contains less information. But the fact remains: people can usually vote faster, with less ballot spoilage, and with less self-reported difficulty, under Range as compared to Condorcet.
I must be odd then, as I find ranking easier than rating. When I rate, I feel like I have to be certain I'm rating them all by a common exact standard, and that I'm not just being right about the ordering but also about "by how much": "Do I rate X at 50% or 55%?". In contrast, for ranking, I just have to know: "I would rather live in a nation with X in power than with Y in power".
In addition, for Range in particular, if I want to make my vote count, I have to vote Approval-style. Picking the right approval cutoff requires access to polls as well as some amount of cleverness. Again, I'm not completely sure why, but I feel that is something I have to do in Range, but ballot optimization in Condorcet (burial, that is), is cheating and bad; perhaps because optimizing well in Range doesn't involve the chance that a candidate you really didn't want to win will win, whereas that can happen with burial.
---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
