I agree with Kristofer. Minor points: Ranking methods only require deciding which candidate is better, while >> range also asks how much and for voter to be understood when expressing >> that "much". >> > > If I remember correctly, the Majority Judgement paper makes that point > when it says that for the method to work well, the voters should have a > common conception of what "Poor" or "Good" means in terms of rating. The > authors suggest using named ratings (like Poor and Good, or A/B/C/D/E/F)
That would be A/B/C/D/F, unless you went to Harvard. Actually, I'd suggest A+/A/B/C/D/F; that way, the MJ tiebreaker effectively gives each candidate a grade from the set (A+,A,A-,B+,B-,C+,C-,D+,D-,F). (If there's still a tie, it can be resolved; in effect, some plusses or minuses are bigger than others). Balinski and Laraki actually suggest a set of 6 word grades (literally translated to Excellent, Very Good, Good, etc.) which are used in the French school system. I think each country should use grades from its school system, which are most likely to be commonly-understood. If the school grades are numeric, I don't have a common prescription. In Mexico, grades are supposedly 0-10, but in reality they are 5-10 so I'd use that as the scale. instead of numbers to better make use of these common conceptions or > standards when they do exist. > > We could thus consider three kinds of ballots: first, the labeled rated > ballot, like MJ, where the question is "according to a common standard, > what grade would you give X, Y, and Z?"; second, a numeric rated ballot, > where the question is "how many points do you give X, Y, and Z, considering > the tradeoffs between awarding points to each of the candidates?"; and > third, a ranked ballot that just asks "Who do you want to win? Who do you > want to win if you can't have the first one? Who do you want to win if you > can't have the first two?" etc. > Yes. And I think it's clear that, of these three ballot types, the first is the easiest to vote, because you can take each candidate as a separate question. Moreover, the first also gives (in theory, assuming continuous grades) the most information. An absolute rated ballot can be normalized into a numeric rated ballot or sorted into a ranked ballot, but not vice versa. Thus, to me it's clear that the absolute rated ballot is the ideal; and median-based systems like MJ are the only ones I know of which use such a ballot. > > The advantage of considering each ballot type to be answers to a certain > type of question is that one can ask how well a method behaves with respect > to the ballots. If each ballot type only is defined in context of the > method with which it is associated, then every method is perfect from its > own point of view. I think I've seen this kind of reasoning elsewhere, e.g. > that IRV is a good method because the ballots specify contingency programs, > not "who would I prefer to have win" type answers, and therefore, IRV > faithfully follows the programs given by the voters, giving results > entirely consistent with the programs. > Dividing methods into sets by ballot types helps if we decide that one ballot type is better than another. I don't think that it's particularly useful to compare other aspects of systems only within the set, though. In other words, at best there is a right answer for a given set of voters, not a right answer for a given set of ballots. Jameson
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