kevin_standlee | Range Voting

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Range Voting

The folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster,

sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."

I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.

WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, Range Voting is monotonic, and FBLE compliant and IIA compliant - these things are all considered significant in voting method science, and this is not based on any assumptions; these things are mathematically provable.

When doing social utility efficiency calculations, we have to make assumptions about what percentage of voters are strategic vs. honest, and informed vs. ignorant, and how many candidates will run in the election, etc. etc. The point is that we varied these assumptions from 100% strategic, over a range to 100% honest, and the same with the other variables. In all of the combinations of parameters, Range Voting beat out the other systems. So don't take the word "assumption" the wrong way. The point is that Range Voting hugely outperforms other methods, no matter what we assume. If we assume that voters will be 100% informed about the candidates but also 100% strategic instead of honest, Range Voting kills the other methods. If we assume 50% of voters will be strategic and 50% will be honest, Range Voting kills the other methods. What Warren Smith expected, when he started out doing these simulations, is that in some models, Range Voting would win, but in other models it would lose, and then it would be a process of trying to find out which of those assumptions was the most like reality, so that we could determine which voting methods really were best. But quite to his surprise, Range Voting won in all of them, like I said. That's why he became such a zealous promoter of this method, and why I think quite highly of it also. Then the more you learn about it, the more wonderful properties it exhibits. It can be done on standard voting machines, IRV can't. Things like that. They just all add up, and then it becomes overwhelming.

And mind you, our real world exit polls show that Range Voting is easy to use - yes, even for voters in a small town in southeast Texas - and that it produces more fair representation of minor parties and independents.

Check out recent results from our online poll, with 1500 people: http://RangeVoting.org/2008.html and see how much better minor party candidates do, because there's not a significant incentive not to give them sincere ratings.

"Confuse my overtaxed brain". Why say silly things like that when we can have an intellectual debate? Clearly I'm not confused, because as my citations above indicate, your claim was wrong, and mine was right. I was just asking you what you meant, because your statement sounds vague to me. I still don't know what exactly you're trying to say. By list system, you mean STV, or does that include ALL ordinal voting systems, such as Condorcet? I can't address your claim if you use vague terminology.

The only thing that's clear is that every source I can find contradicts your claim, and suggests that it is in fact you who doesn't "get" it.

So, talking about my "deeply rooted misapprehensions" is just hand-waving, instead of offering counter-evidence.

But of course you probably have a life, so I don't expect you to spend hours going back and forth about this. All I would encourage you to do is face the very probably fact that those wikipedia entries are correct, and you were just confused before. No reason to feel bad about that. Mistakes happen.

No you didn't address my concerns. You just talked down to me and threw out a whole bunch of talking points.

If by "talking points" you mean, facts that support my claims, then sure, I did. I proved Range Voting is a better voting method than IRV.

For example you used examples that are not anything like the elections we run. We don't get 40 candidates.

Most of our discussions of IRV, as well as our social utility simulations, deal with anywhere from 3 to 6 candidates. I was just making the point that, with more, IRV falls apart even worse.

You don't know anything about our group or how it works, you've just parachuted in without doing research about us and demand that we research your system.

I'm not debating about your group, I'm debating about IRV, something which I know apparently more than any of you about. Consider that a lot of you here didn't even know what the name of your voting method was. Consider that I wrote this page: http://RangeVoting.org/IRV.html Consider that I have conducted phone conversations with Australian minor parties to ask them about their experiences using IRV. Have any of you done any kind of actual research about IRV? I'm guessing not, or at least very little.

I'm not "demanding" you use Range Voting, I'm just pointing out the advantages of it, which for some reason has been met with irrational hostility by several.

Again, it's not my job to do your work for you. I'm telling you how you can do something that is better for YOU and helps YOU. If you choose not to do it, that's your loss. Why I'm even still here debating with you is anyone's guess. Basically because I just love a good debate. It's 3:30am and I have to get up at 6:30. I'm up arguing still because, hell, I just love to debate I guess. Why be so hostile to someone who is only trying to help you help yourself?

Ah. So your argument of voter preference for this system is entirely specious. Thank you, that tells me all I need to know.

Being disproven by Wikipedia has really upset you apparently, so much so that you are now responding to me with completely random nonsense comments. Oh, kayyy.

It's not bugs in your software, it's the assumptions made when writing the software and creating the data.

Our assumptions range from one extreme to another, and everywhere in between. Range Voting beat the other systems by a huge margin, no matter WHICH assumptions we used. You guys seem to be having a really hard time following that part. If we assume voters are stupid, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are educated, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are strategic, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are honest, Range Voting wins.

If the software has some kind of flaws that you'd care to point out, we'd welcome your specific analysis and suggestions for improvement.

Social utility/cost benefit/"economic man" arguments are always liable to drift away from reality

The simulations used hundreds of millions of different randomized distributions of voters and candidates, and yet Range Voting consistently won out, by a large margin. No matter what placement you think is realistic, with that many simulations, some of them should have come close to modeling real world distributions, yet Range Voting consistently won, and by a lot. If this effect was purely coincidence, we should have expected to see many scenarios where Range Voting just randomly happened to do worse than other systems. Yet that didn't happen. Clearly then, it's not just a random coincidence. The odds of that are infinitesimally low. We can be extremely confident that this really is an effect of the properties of Range Voting, and not just some random fluke. If it was just a random fluke, we wouldn't expect it to hold true over hundreds of millions of trials.

But the WSFS elections aren't government offices. There isn't Millions or Billions of dollars spent on the "campaigns." The voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (or members of that particular year's Worldcon.) And they are readers, viewers, writers, artists, editors, etc.

So presumably the effect of strategic voting is small. Well, Range Voting beats IRV by a huge amount, when voters aren't strategic (or if they are), so it would still be benifical to you.

Trying to change our system and opinuion becuase you say something else isn't better without actual proof that it is better. Voting simulations aren't going to do it.

On the contrary, they do "do it". They show that the social utility efficiency of Range Voting is substantially better than with IRV.

Neither are made up examples formed to prove a point.

But they do prove the point. For instance, the scenario where IRV picks the wrong winner is mathematically proven to happen around 19.7% of the time. That's a fact that you can't escape by just waving your hands and saying, "No, you can't fool me with your silly math."

It's just as easy to make up examples that will cause Range Voting to produce unwanted results.

Sure, you can create such examples, as I did myself in a spreadsheet which I linked people to in some of my other posts. The issue is how frequently these various scenarios actually come up, which we can objecively calculate. That's what social utility efficiency calculations are all about.

Rather than refuting this, all I've heard anyone here do is express sheer incredulity: "Your simulations don't prove anything."

Well, sure they don't, if you clearly don't understand how they work, how they are derived, etc. But in order for someone to explain that to you, you have to actually present your argument so that your mistakes can be exposed. By not making any argument, but hand-waving, you're not even enjoying the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and misunderstanding. That's truly sad.

Clay

Range voting: Decide how much you like each candidate vis a vis all the other ones.

You have it completely backward. People rate items like faces or movies all the time, without relating them directly to other options. A movie is thought of as a "five" if it was about average, or a 10 if it was just absolutely superb and classic, or an 8 if it was really good, etc.

But now in order to "pick your favorite" you, BY DEFINITION, have to compare every single option with every single other one. Sure, IRV sounds simpler when you completely distort reality.

Worry about the balancing effect of other people's votes.

You have to do the same thing with IRV, so that's a poor argument. And with IRV, using strategy effectively equates to the same strategy as with plurality voting, causing much worse results. Range Voting, on the other hand, handles strategy gracefully. It produces greater social utility efficiency under completely strategic electorates than IRV often produces under completely honest electorates.

This doesn't come up in IRV, since second preferences have no effect unless your first preference has been eliminated, so there's no need for strategic voting.

False. This has to be the biggest single myth (I would probably say "lie", since we've corrected them on it, but they still say it) perpetuated by IRV advocates like FairVote.org. See this example:

#voters their vote
20 McCain > Gore > Dean
10 Gore > McCain > Dean
29 Dean > Gore > McCain

With IRV, Gore is eliminated, and McCain beats Dean, 30-29. But what if 10 people in the third group strategically "betray" their sincere favorite, Dean, andmove him to last place:

#voters their vote
20 McCain > Gore > Dean
20 Gore > McCain > Dean
19 Dean > Gore > McCain

Now Gore wins, which is better for those strategic betrayers.

With Range Voting, there is never an incentive not to give a maximum score to your favorite candidate however. The strategies in Range Voting are much less problematic.

And no, this isn't a contrived example - this type of scenario happens around 20% of the time.

so you 'win' by finding out that one of your examples of IRV duopoly doesn't actually use IRV

All of my examples were IRV. Ireland uses IRV in their presidential post, and it is two-party dominated (or more like ONE party dominated, except for a single exceptional fluke, when Mary Robinson won). This is especially significant, because Ireland's legislature has multiple viable parties, which should help there be more competetive parties for the post.

The same is true of Australia's house of representatives, since its Senate uses STV, and had something like 6 greens last I checked. But it's house of reps, which uses IRV, is a two party body. Australianpolitics.com says IRV "promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents." In Australian politics, this isn't even questioned, it's just accepted as a fact.

SBQ

No it's, we have overwhelming evidence, so consider approaching it scientifically instead of dismissing it before you've really even begun to process/understand it. People thought Einstein was crazy when he said a star's gravitational pull would bend light, but when they actually looked at the evidence, they ate humble pie. So, ignore me, and just look at the evidence. Stop hand-waving and dogmatically asserting, and start doing real science.

There are costs associated with administering preference polls, running elections, etc. The cost of even looking at the range stuff is time and effort.

And since Range Voting can be done in just one round, always, whereas IRV can take multiple rounds, IRV is "cheaper"/easier. Another great reason to dump the wreck that is IRV for Range Voting.

The range stuff sort of reminds me of that--sort of. One thing I notice is that there appears to be -no- calibration involved, no normalization, and that tends to create garbage for both an analysis and results of analysis..

Some have suggested that we automatically normalize the Range Voting ballots, but there's no hard evidence that actually produces greater social utility efficiency. On the contrary, I have a pretty well founded intuition that people's inherent tendency to convert their honest utilities to range ballots using a sort of logarithmic process (sort of like treating increasing utility with diminishing returns) actually increases social utility efficiency. We could test that by adding some new strategy generators to the utility calculation software, but I'm too lazy, and I want to rewrite the software in D before I further modify it.

Okay folks, I've enjoyed going a few rounds with you. I've had time to address 70% of the customary newbie misconceptions that I always hear when introducing new groups to Range Voting, like the myth that one can't vote "strategically" with IRV (there's no incentive not to vote honestly). Now I'm just beating a dead horse.

BUT...voting method researchers could benefit immensely if you would publish your ballots using numbers instead of names (to totally preserve anonymity). There are advocates of Condorcet and Approval voting as well, and I'm sure they'd also enjoy access to this information. It would be cool to contribute to science by making it available, if it wouldn't be any real investment of resources on your part (which I would hope it wouldn't be).

If you have any interest in that, please email me at thebrokenladder@gmail.com.

Best wishes to everyone, and again thank you for the lively debate.

Clay

Yes.

For example, humans might even behave irrationally and feel, y'know, insulted by your comment.

The question is not whether the IRV rules are a subset of the STV rules. I already agreed that they were, before you ever brought Wikipedia up. Yes, applying the STV rules to one seat amounts to IRV, I said so specifically, and I never said otherwise. That you apparently think I did shows your poor grasp of the argument.

The question is whether they are classified and terminologically described in political science as the same system. They are not, and I offered proof in the form of a poli sci citation. You offered Wikipedia, and the fact that you could say something like "proven wrong by Wikipedia" shows your ignorance and poor hold on both reality and argumentation. Wikipedia has a lot of useful and accurate information, but it is completely unreliable as proof of anything whatsoever. You'd be thrown out of class for using it as a citation of anything.

So if you "apply" STV to a one-seat election, you get IRV. AND YOU SHOULD CALL IT IRV, NOT STV. That was my original point in this thread. My original comment was not addressed to you, but to a curious bystander who was clearly uninterested in polisci trivia. And I'm sorry the fact that I didn't bother to mention to that person the complex relationship between the STV rules and IRV rules has confused your - again - poor overtaxed mind.

In the name "Single Transferable Vote," the word "transferable" refers to the surplus majority transfer. This has no place in IRV and consequently the name STV is totally inapplicable to IRV, despite the fact that all the rules of IRV do have a place in STV.

I dropped the discussion of the comparative virtues of systems not out of lack of counterarguments, but because you are completely impervious to the significance of the points that make you mistaken. See

kevin_standlee's last comments, and see his next post. And indeed, I see you've gone on to claim that I am mistaken in my own personal preferences, so you've gone beyond all previous benchmarks of arrogance.

I thought I could continue to clarify this simple matter of terminological classification, but even there it turns out that your bewilderment is too great to overcome. Sorry.

And no, the ape/mammal comparison is inapplicable. That is not how these systems are classified. And I have not misunderstood my textbook. Here is how that book - again, it's Geography of Elections by Taylor and Johnston - classifies the systems it discusses.

1. The Plurality System

(i) The plurality system in single-member constituencies

(ii) Multi-member plurality sytems

(iii) Weighted plurality systems

2. Preferential systems

(i) Single-member preferential systems

(a) The alternative vote [i.e. IRV, which did not yet have that name]

(b) The double-ballot

(ii) Multi-member preferential systems

(a) The single transferable vote

3. List systems

(i) The simultaneous list

(ii) The local list

(iii) The party list

4. Mixed systems [which it doesn't enumerate in a list]

In the description of STV, page 59 of the Penguin edition, it says, "If, as with our hypothetical example, no candidate exceeds the quota of 651 and there are still seats to be filled, the procedure used in the alternative vote [that is, IRV] is operated."

So it acknowledges the relationship between the two, but you see that it depicts STV as borrowing the procedure for IRV - which, in fact, it does not always need to do in actual cases - not as IRV being a special case of STV.

You can look at them that way if you want, but it is not inaccurate to say that they are different systems and that a single-winner election using it should say it is using IRV, not STV.

voting method researchers could benefit immensely if you would publish your ballots using numbers instead of names (to totally preserve anonymity

Oh, I can just imagine the furor at a WSFS Business Meeting if anyone tried to do that. I got yelled at in 1995 when I tried to ask site selection voters which region (there are four) they were from, and WSFS passed a resolution saying it was inappropriate. Yes, I know you say it would "preserve anonymity" but remember, people don't act rationally.

Worldcons publish detailed Hugo voting counts. Sometimes, they even put those counts online, like Noreascon Four did. I don't know if that gives you enough detail to be useful or not.

I could find an infinite number of examples like this, which completely disprove your assertion that confidence in the quality of something affects the quality of that thing.

You're saying that if you weren't terrified of flying, you wouldn't consider the quality of the experience better? That's crazy!

You seem to be assuming a totally objective measurement of quality applicable to something that has a subjective element. What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter to me if your contrived "quality" system says something it utter perfection if my perceived quality of that thing is zero. It's like telling a kid to eat his vegetables because they are good for him. We know they're good for him. He may even agree that they are good for him. But he hates the taste, and therefore won't eat them, even though by "objective" standards, he should be doing so.

From me: The cost of even looking at the range stuff is time and effort.

Clue 1: it takes time and effort to read through and try to follow the descriptions that the proponents of range voting give, and time to try to follow the analysis. That is time and effort that the person is giving up from doing things that might be more interesting and rewarding to them, than reading ideological ranting about how wonderful range voting is and everyone should go to it....

From thebroken/r/e/c/o/r/d/ladder:

And since Range Voting can be done in just one round, always, whereas IRV can take multiple rounds..

Clue #2: there is software in place if I am not mistaken, for tallying results of voting for Worldscon site selection and the Hugos. Changing the voting system would require writing -new- software, testing it, etc. etc. etc. The existing methods have "sunk costs." Changing to something else, would entail a lot of time and effort. Is it worthwhile as expenditure of volunteer time and labor, particularly, are there people trusted within the community competent to implement range voting who would actually go to the effort and time and personal expense to do so? Even were there any substantiative interest by the Business Meeting to make a change, unless there is the wherewithal to do so--someone competent and willing to go to the effort of developing and implementing etc. the software, it would be moot.

...I have a pretty well founded intuition that people's inherent tendency to convert their honest utilities to range ballots using a sort of logarithmic process (sort of like treating increasing utility with diminishing returns) actually increases social utility efficiency.

Why should I value you intuition? I have seen no evidence of what I consider considered reasonable competence and ability to do competent analysis, conclusion generation, recommendation generation, and presentation of results in a reasonable fashion. That is, what I am seeing presented by you, does not come off as something done by someone who has made an adequate investigation and analysis of what, who, how, and who has not bothered to tune the presentation to the audience and has failed to consider audience response and interaction with the audience and audience opinions, values, interests, etc.

You showed up with an agenda to push, and have with vast amounts of temerity and energy, proceeded to push it....

You keep referring to "social efficiency." Just what is "social efficiency and why should I or anyone else here care about it? It looks like some arbitrary definition of some value you have, it may not be seen as a viable or reasonable or desirable or rational metric by others.

Generation of Hugo and site selection results, does NOT get done by the entire convention. A small number of people are involved directly, the other thousands of people, don't get involved in handling any ballot than the individual one they submit. In terms of "efficiency" then it is immaterial to 99.99 percent of the Worldcon members what the specific software, etc., that gets used is, or methods, so long as the method used follows the will of the membership for type of voting, that the results are honest outcomes based on the submitted valid ethically-submitted ballots, and that the results get announced in a timely fashion. It doesn't particularly affect MY life if it takes Keven, John, Rick, or whoever five minutes, or hours, or days, to deal with ballots and the data crunching, I'm not someone who has done ballot counting and data entry and software running to generate the results! It does affect my life if I hear them complaining about it, but otherwise...

We could test that by adding some new strategy generators to the utility calculation software, but I'm too lazy, and I want to rewrite the software in D before I further modify it.

Who're these "we"?

You are apparently someone who enjoys writing software code... however, "all code has bugs." Who do you propose to e.g. do code reviews? What are the independent validation and verification requirements? Why should anyone believe that your code is accurate... where are the system spec, requirements, etc.?

I looked at this again, and your misinterpretations are so amazing I couldn't resist saying more.

You quote the Wiki on Droop quota to counter my statement that Droop quota threshold calculation has no place in IRV. But in fact the Wiki on Droop quota calculation says just what I said: that you don't calculate it in IRV, you just go straight to simple majority.

Same thing is true with surplus vote allocation. The concept of a relative percentage calculation is essential to STV. It has no place in IRV, and your own argument says so.

A counting system designed to produce a single winner is not the same thing as a counting system designed to produce multiple winners, even if the number of multiple winners varies. That is a standard concept which you are fruitlessly trying to deny.

In what respect? You mean to say that the material is too complicated? Too boring? What exactly is your complaint?

Poorly presented, perhaps. Upon a second reading, it looks like a fairly simple system, but you're making it sound much more complex than it needs to be.

I still have a major problem with it: the points you award to a given candidate can be all over the map. A voter who votes "candidate A=9, B=5, C=1" has more weight given to his vote than a voter who opts for "A=3, B=2, C=1" when they've ranked the candidates in the exact same order. This may be a good way of rating a book or a movie for the purpose of telling someone how much you enjoyed it, but it's not good for choosing a convention site or giving out awards when you're comparing two or more candidates directly against each other.

This isn't Olympic figure skating, where every candidate starts out with a score of 6.0 and points are deducted for turning a triple Axel into a double.

Oh, and I also take issue with your example of bees. Simply screaming the loudest is no way to make a democratic decision.

Even with the corrected HTML, I'm not sure I understand this example; that 2nd place vote doesn't seem to be for anything, even "none of the above."

21 Bush > Gore > Dean
10 Gore > Bush > Dean
10 Gore > Dean > Bush
20 Dean > Gore > Bush

With IRV, Gore is eliminated, and Bush beats Dean 31-30. But wait! Gore is preferred to Bush 40-21 - a bigger percentage than any landslide election in our history. IRV picks the wrong winner in this scenario. As a result, the utility efficiency of IRV is significantly lower than that produced by Range Voting.

Actually, under our Constitution, if those were the results than both Gore and Dean would be eliminated after the first ballot, and Bush would be declared the winner 21-20-20:

"Votes shall first be tallied by the voter's first choices. If no majority is then obtained, the candidate who places last in the initial tallying shall be eliminated and the ballots listing it as first choice shall be redistributed on the basis of those ballots' second choices. This process shall be repeated until a majority-vote winner is obtained. If two or more candidates are tied for elimination during this process, the candidate that received fewer first-place votes shall be eliminated. If they are still tied, all the tied candidates shall be eliminated together."

Can I have another example?

With two candidates, strategic range voting is the same as single preference: everybody is going to vote 0 and 10 for the two candidates (assuming a 0-10 range).

This is called Approval Voting (http://rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html), and it's a great voting method - vastly better than IRV. But since a lot of people vote honestly with Range Voting, it produces greater satisfaction and better representation of minor parties.

Also consider that with multi-winner Range Voting (called 'Reweighted Range Voting (http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html)') there is a huge incentive to be honest with your scores, because in each round, your ballot is weighted based on the total of the scores you have given to already-elected candidates. Using a full range for single-winner elections as well, achieves continuity if nothing else.

With multiple candidates, the "ideal way" to vote strategically depends, as I've said before, on your estimate of how everyone else will vote...It's easy to show that voting 10 for your favorites, and 0 for the rest, is optimal for some value of .

Not necessarily, but usually.

But you don't know which value.

Which is a good thing - it prevents the problematic "bullet vote" strategy. But even if all voters knew the exact preferences of all other voters, and bullet-voted, this would just be to a Condorcet method. Range Voting at its worst is as good or better than Condorcet at its best.

So the simulations used a strategy that depended on voters knowing in advance the approximate results; what happens when those assumptions are erroneous?

Then Range Voting does even better, because the zero-info strategy is to guess your expected satisfaction with the outcome, and minimize your score for everyone who would make you less satisfied than that, and maximize your score for the rest. This removes the strategy to polarize your scores for two front-runners, both of whom you like. This is effectively honest Approval Voting.

The simulation results also didn't describe the distribution of preferences; if they were independent random variables, they don't resemble real preferences well enough to be useful.

At least two of the methods are described here (http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html):

Here's the paper (http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/rangevote.pdf). Utilities are generally based on a random Gaussian distribution of voters and candidates within n-dimensional issue space. A 2-issue space would be like a Nolan chart (http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/politics/chart_political.gif). Each voter's utility is a function of his ideological distance from the candidates.

Ironically, the more issues we add, the closer the utilities comes toward matching a random distribution! Even more unintuitive, the results obtained from a simple 2-issue utility generator are negligibly different than those obtained by a straight random distribution. So it turns out, your intuition that random utilities would not sufficiently model real preferences turns out not to be correct. In other news, massive objects bend light, contrary to intuition.

As for bad examples, I can construct some (based on voters guessing wrong about other voters) where the winner is not the majority or Condorcet winner, nor produces the greatest social utility. In fact, he can be in the bottom half of the pack.

Expected value is value times probability, which is why Smith's calculations used hundreds of millions of simulated elections. For every situation where Range Voting performs poorly, there are more scenarios where IRV performs more poorly.

I also thought I also might mention this shout out (http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2007/02/dark-light-scenarios-swinging-from.html) to Range Voting recently, from Hugo Award recipient David Brin.

You should want your election results to coincide with how YOU and the other voters think things ought to be. That's the point of an election. Range Voting will give you almost as big of an improvement over your current system, as your current system improves over drawing a name out of a hat. Think about how much more representative winners become by going from random selection to your current voting method. Now add another 80-90% of that increase. Do you really want randomness to play such a huge part in your elections?

Yes, I stupidly had Gore and Dean tie here. Change it to percentages as

34
17
15
34

And then you should get the point.

Poorly presented, perhaps. Upon a second reading, it looks like a fairly simple system, but you're making it sound much more complex than it needs to be.

I presented it as "Score all the candidates and elect the one who has the highest average." How does that make it sound complicated?

It is important to differentiate between the complexity of the actual voting method, and the complexity of understanding why the voting method is good. In other words, explaining to people what monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives are. Explaining social utility efficiency...that can be frustrating and difficult. But that has nothing to do with how complicated the voting method itself is. When people say that Range Voting would fail under strategic voting, I have to pull out social utility efficiency calculations to prove to them, "No, you're wrong, it wouldn't" and "stop expecting your intuition to have any place in such a deeply mathematical discussion".

A voter who votes "candidate A=9, B=5, C=1" has more weight given to his vote than a voter who opts for "A=3, B=2, C=1" when they've ranked the candidates in the exact same order.

This is a benefit of Range Voting. Say a third voter came in and scored A=0, B=6. B would be the logical winner, even though A is the first choice of two voters. That is, a switch from B to A would only affect voter 2 a tiny amount, and take voter 1 from being moderately happy to being very happy. But voter 3 would go from relative happiness to misery. I don't think that's a good situation. But if voters don't agree, they are free to maximize their scores. In fact, I suggest they do - because what meaning do any scores have if you do not first give your least and most favorite a minimum and maximum score respectively? Without a frame of reference, what do the numbers even mean?

So, in short, don't blame the voting system when voters do silly things. This reminds me of the 97,488 Floridians who voted for Nader in 2000, only to help secure the victory for Bush. Should we have taken Nader off the ballot, to protect them from their own silliness?

This may be a good way of rating a book or a movie for the purpose of telling someone how much you enjoyed it, but it's not good for choosing a convention site or giving out awards when you're comparing two or more candidates directly against each other.

On the contrary, it's the best of the common single-winner voting methods, based on extensive calculations of social utility efficiency (http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html). That is, by using Range Voting, you will be greatly more satsified with election results than you would be with IRV. The effect is almost as large as the one caused by going from random selection, to IRV elections like you have now.

This isn't Olympic figure skating, where every candidate starts out with a score of 6.0 and points are deducted for turning a triple Axel into a double.

I don't recall ever saying that it was. It has been compared more to gymnastics scoring, but even then that's just to give people the concept in a simple recognizable scenario. Maybe "like rating books on Amazon" would be better for certain audiences.

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Range Voting

Re: Range Voting

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Re: Supermajority vote?

Re: Missing the point

Re: Erroneously?

no subject

no subject

Re: Missing the point

no subject

Re: Missing the point

Re: Missing the point

no subject

Re: Range Voting

no subject

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no subject

Re: Supermajority vote?

Re: Missing the point

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Disaster?

Re: I'm a geek

no subject

no subject