I am pleased that Clay Shentrup, an especially well informed very strong advocate for score voting (range voting), has contributed to the discussion. I am grateful for his links to informative analyses and his reference to the William Poundstone book "Gaming the Vote". Score voting as a name seems to convey the meaning of the method better, although, range voting is the most popular name for the method. I have read some of William Poundstone's books in past decades with great interest. His book on voting methods is an especially up to date popular introduction. Gaming the vote : why elections aren't fair (and what we can do about it) / William Poundstone. - New York : Hill and Wang, 2008. The adoption of voting methods using software to analyse preference votes in online communities such as Debian is mentioned. The most significant criticism I have of what I have read from the book is that Poundstone sometimes accepts a little too much from some voting theory experts at face value without more careful analysis. [Clay is described in the book as a fanatical advocate for score voting but good ideas need somewhat fanatical supporters to ensure that they have due attention. Without strong support from some people, good ideas are often overlooked in favour of what is already popular or well financed.] While score voting is commonplace in the world examining preferences, its explicit proposal as a voting method for elections may be dated from a paper by Warren Smith introducing the idea. Range Voting / Warren D Smith. - December 2000 - http://www.math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/rangevote.pdf . Score voting may be interpreted as a superset of multiple voting methods including the highly regarded Condorcet method, http://www.scorevoting.net/CondDQ.html . Score voting more consistently obtains a winner conforming to the Condorcet principle than the classic Condorcet method does itself. The Condorcet principle sums the winners of the preferences for each candidate compared to each other candidate in a series of candidate pairs. In another message, I will address the important issues of voting strategy with score voting. Remainder of reply inline: On Sat, January 8, 2011 04:38, Clay Shentrup wrote: 1. CONSTRICTING RANGE RELATIVE TO NUMBER OF VOTERS.
FairVote's argument against Score Voting (aka Range Voting) is mathematically flawed.
I had not remembered anything about FairVote and had merely observed the link from the range voting Wikipedia article. The deficiency in the FairVote criticism of range voting to which I linked was that the scenario they give uses a range which is unduly high relative to the number of voters. Their scenario has 100 voters casting ballots with a range of 0 to 99. The relatively large range allows merely two voters using a reasonable voting strategy of casting their greatest preference strongly at the maximum range of 99 to outvote all other voters expressing their greatest preference weakly near the minimum of the range at 1. The construction of the case is so unreasonable that I expected I was missing something about how score votes are meant to be counted. Score voting is concerned with voting within a restricted range. Without any range, whichever voter could record the highest imaginable number on a ballot would decide an election. A reasonably low range relative to the number of voters along with voters who use some half intelligent sense of voting strategy avoids the unreasonable case above. [In a later message, I will propose a means for resolving some issues of voting strategy.] 2. FAIRVOTE: THE CENTER FOR VOTING AND DEMOCRACY.
FairVote began as "Citizens for Proportional Representation", and I believe their real interest in implementing Single Transferable Vote in the USA, like e.g. Australia uses in their Senate. Because IRV ("preferential vote") is the single-winner case of STV, FairVote pushes it as a useful "stepping stone". I do not believe they particularly care about the merits of IRV, and in fact they have made numerous blatantly false and misleading statements on voting for many years.
Some statements from FairVote founder, Robert Richie, seem to show that he would advocate whatever non-plurality (non-first past the post) voting method would be most likely to obtain sufficient political support to be implemented for government elections. Any real preference by FairVote may be for a voting method which is useful as first step to proportional representation, the long term objective of FairVote. Instant runoff voting can be transformed into the single transferable ballot for proportional representation. Poundstone reports that there has been sufficient support to institute instant runoff voting in some jurisdictions because of well financed support from FairVote. Less well financed supporters of alternatives other than instant runoff voting appear divided because all voting systems are subject to some significant criticism. 3. INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING.
Warren D. Smith, a Princeton math Ph.D. who has studied voting theory for over a decade, and sort of served as the "protagonist" of the book _Gaming the Vote_ responds specifically to several of the
FairVote statements here: http://ScoreVoting.net/Irvtalk.html
My innocent and ignorant link to the FairVote criticism of range voting within their comparison of instant runoff voting (IRV) to other voting systems had not been meant as a suggestion that instant runoff voting be considered for the Koha community. I had considered making a comment against IRV along with my link to the FairVote criticism of range voting but I decided against that in case FairVote might have some adequate modification of IRV. I have not identified any adequate modification of IRV. IRV works by always eliminating some preferences. [Other preference voting systems attempt to compare all preferences without eliminating any.] Eliminating preferences is a poor basis for a goal of maximising voter preferences and leads to an unacceptably high likelihood of a result which people would find unwanted. 4. SCORE VOTING (RANGE VOTING).
Here is a response to the specific (and actually quite absurd) criticism that Score Voting and Approval Voting violate "majority rule", particularly as compared to IRV.
http://www.electology.org/majority
The "right" metric of voting method performance (and you can basically prove it mathematically, as counter-intuitive as that may seem) is "average voter satisfaction" which can be expressed using ametric called Bayesian regret. Look at this graph of Bayesian regret values and notice how vastly much better Score and Approval Voting perform. IRV is actually almost bad as Plurality/FPtP. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
The calculation of Bayesian regret in the graph cited from "Gaming the Vote" is a selection from Warren Smith's computer simulation of 144 voting scenarios with different parameters in which regret is presumably triggered by outcomes disfavouring and sometimes subverting preferences of individual voters in the simulation. The election simulation software used is the Infinitely Extendible Voting Simulator (IEVS). The best description which I found for IEVS is in a grant proposal, http://www.rangevoting.org/PewIEVS.pdf . The code is available at http://www.rangevoting.org/IEVS/IEVS.c . Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com +1 212-674-3783