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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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 08:27 am (UTC)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.