Tuesday, May 12, 2009
This is in response to this article: Why first-past-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed.
In the above article, range voting (please read it) is thrown out of consideration for publication review by other economists on the grounds that the values assigned to candidates are arbitrary and therefore meaningless:
I argue that this premise is untrue. There is meaning available when comparing two or more candidates along a range, and the values are not arbitrary for the individual voter. What these economists are really describing is that the range of values is not fixed (defined in the same way) for all voters. There is not an absolute range.
To the economists I say: Get out of your left brain!
Selecting a candidate for an important decision is as much a gut feeling (right brain) as it is a logical decision. Since there are so many factors that go into determining who is "better" (a pretty meaningless word in and of itself), the process of logical deduction often breaks down and we must also rely on instinct. This is totally evident in how campaigns play out. We like to think we choose people based on their stated positions on particular issues, but it often boils down to the behavior of the candidate before and during the campaign and our feelings about it. "Better" is a muddy little melting pot of conflicted feelings and specific values. How can we possibly say X should be voted over Y when there is no clear absolute value of what "better" is?
Since each voter can determine what the voting range means for them (i.e. they get to pick what "better" means to them), they are guaranteed to feel more satisfaction. A major benefit of range voting is that you are not forced to pick on candidate over the other, and you can also show disdain for all candidates (I've long argued that there should be a "none of the above" box on the ballot). This eliminates having to pick "the lesser evil". If there is one or two voters the system fails, but in larger voting pools, the wisdom (or stupidity) of the crowd takes over.
Another possible benefit is increased voter turnout. If a potential voter feels they can accurately describe their view on all the candidates and not be forced to pick one, apathy evaporates and they may be more likely to vote (hypothesizing here, but I think it would encourage a lot of people).
In the above article, range voting (please read it) is thrown out of consideration for publication review by other economists on the grounds that the values assigned to candidates are arbitrary and therefore meaningless:
Arrow, now 86 and professor emeritus at Stanford University, maintains that voting systems based on scores rather than rankings don't measure up. "I don't think [range voting] is a true voting system," he says. Before publishing his theorem, Arrow and his colleagues considered value-based systems but dismissed them. "We felt there was no meaning to compare values between people," says Arrow.
I argue that this premise is untrue. There is meaning available when comparing two or more candidates along a range, and the values are not arbitrary for the individual voter. What these economists are really describing is that the range of values is not fixed (defined in the same way) for all voters. There is not an absolute range.
To the economists I say: Get out of your left brain!
Selecting a candidate for an important decision is as much a gut feeling (right brain) as it is a logical decision. Since there are so many factors that go into determining who is "better" (a pretty meaningless word in and of itself), the process of logical deduction often breaks down and we must also rely on instinct. This is totally evident in how campaigns play out. We like to think we choose people based on their stated positions on particular issues, but it often boils down to the behavior of the candidate before and during the campaign and our feelings about it. "Better" is a muddy little melting pot of conflicted feelings and specific values. How can we possibly say X should be voted over Y when there is no clear absolute value of what "better" is?
Since each voter can determine what the voting range means for them (i.e. they get to pick what "better" means to them), they are guaranteed to feel more satisfaction. A major benefit of range voting is that you are not forced to pick on candidate over the other, and you can also show disdain for all candidates (I've long argued that there should be a "none of the above" box on the ballot). This eliminates having to pick "the lesser evil". If there is one or two voters the system fails, but in larger voting pools, the wisdom (or stupidity) of the crowd takes over.
Another possible benefit is increased voter turnout. If a potential voter feels they can accurately describe their view on all the candidates and not be forced to pick one, apathy evaporates and they may be more likely to vote (hypothesizing here, but I think it would encourage a lot of people).
posted by KaOs at
5/12/2009 10:14:00 AM
2 Comments:
The larger point is that it doesn't even matter whether the scores themselves have some illusory property called "meaning". They are a function of the actual objective utilities the voters assign to the candidates. Using extensive computer simulations, Warren D. Smith (the Princeton math Ph.D. who serves as the book's chief protagonist) shows that score voting (aka range voting) produces more satisfying results for the average voter, according to an objective measure of utility called Bayesian regret. This is true even when you factor in various sources of randomness - like voter ignorance, or the screw that happens from normalizing the voters' actual utility values into scores.
wegadeobrette
yd5f
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