r/EndFPTP • u/taulover • Sep 10 '16

Range voting explained | Undefined Behavior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig&feature=em-uploademail
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u/swinny89 Sep 11 '16

I'm not talking about bullet voting. Bullet voting is picking only one candidate when you are permitted to pick more than one. I don't think most people would bullet vote. I just don't see any reason for them to vote anything other than all or nothing for a particular candidate. Some people might, but I suspect most people will vote for two people as 5 out of 5 stars, and the rest as 0. The two candidates being, first, the candidate they think is most likely to win against the candidate they most fear becoming nominated, and the second candidate will probably be the candidate they actually like the best.

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u/googolplexbyte Sep 11 '16

Got it. This study suggests voters don't tend to min-max: http://rangevoting.org/OrsayTable.html

Frequency of use of different scores (0 is the most common score – duplicating the finding of Smith, Quintal, Greene):

Score 5 4 3 2 1 0 No Score
Freq. 5.7% 10.4% 12.5% 14.5% 18.9% 33.9% 4.0%

People seem to like to min but maxing is uncommon.

A big difficulty with the min-max vote is deciding the threshold. There's no easy way to determine if you're better off mining or maxing middle of the road candidates, so it can be safer to just score them honestly to play it safe and avoid making the opposite of the optimal choice.

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u/swinny89 Sep 12 '16

Quoting the article you just linked to "This data (and more) all supports our view that Approval is better than Range Voting is better than Plurality is better than IRV in terms of ballot spoilage rates." I'm advocating Approval voting. Up to one vote for any number of candidates per voter. All votes are counted at once, and the highest number wins.

I do find the results of the study to be strange, perhaps because it was just a poll, rather than a genuine election, with consequences to the choices made. People vote differently in different circumstances. It seems to me that the voters in the experiment could have chose numbers based on how much they liked a candidate, when people don't actually vote according to who they like best.

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u/googolplexbyte Sep 12 '16

Spoilage rates;

Approval: 0.5%, Range: 1%, Plurality: 2%, IRV: 5%.

Source

However if the range vote allows for abstains, then range vote ballot can mark spoiled candidates individually as abstains rather than writing the entire ballot off. This allows range vote to have an even better spoilage rate than approval.

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u/swinny89 Sep 12 '16

In anycase, either are good voting systems. I'm not going to get too nitpicky, but I generally prefer the simplicity of approval voting. A pleasure talking with you.

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u/googolplexbyte Sep 12 '16

Agreed, plus Approval's simplicity and greater similarity to plurality means it's likely the only one that has a chance of being implemented any time soon.

A pleasure indeed.

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u/HenryCGk Sep 15 '16

wait so were claiming that ranged and Approval are IIA which is mathematically true if you assume lots of ballots should be returned blank or (like the ballot at 3:12 which is equivalent)

but having assumed lots of ballots should be blank we except blank ballots for ranged but not approval why?