I don't know why you mentioned the"one person, one vote" principle in connection with your statement that you want to average over the "yes" or "no" votes and leave abstentions with respect to a given candidate out of the averaging for that candidate.
In Approval Voting, a good strategy for handling your compromise candidate, I think, is to use a source of random numbers to construct a variable that has a 1% probability of evaluating to 0 and a 99% probability of evaluating to 1. Approve your compromise candidate if the value is 1, and otherwise, vote against your compromise candidate.
This debate comes up over and over again. Do you want to allow write-ins? Would you give each voter the option of specifying that for write-ins that other voters write in but that that voter doesn't write in, their ballot should count with respect to that candidate as a vote against? Otherwise, there is the risk of electing a fanatic that hardly anyone knows about but who has 100 supporters.
It is not possible to design a voting system that correctly gauges the voters' opinions of the candidates.
Could this be used for approval as well as score voting? http://scorevoting.net/BetterQuorum.html
... In the system that I advocate
, I do not see how it denies you freedom to vote against anyone you choose to vote against, even if it is because you don't know him.
...
On Saturday, February 6, 2016 at 6:20:51 PM UTC-5, Bruce R. Gilson wrote:On Saturday, February 6, 2016 at 11:20:04 AM UTC-5, Bruce R. Gilson wrote:On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 9:56 AM, William Waugh <2knuw...@snkmail.com> wrote:It is not possible to design a voting system that correctlygauges the voters' opinions of the candidates.In that case, why are we discussing voting systems at all? Just randomly pick someone, as they did in some Greek city-states, to fill each office.
Because in Bayesian Regret studies, Approval does better than random choice.The purpose of elections is toaccord the citizens political power.You totally lose me here. What is the difference between "gaug[ing]the voters' opinions of the candidates"and "accord[ing]the citizens political power"? The only way I exercise any power in an election is to choose candidates who, in my opinion, are likely to act in the way I would desire.
The difference is that if you are gauging opinion, you ask for opinion without any consequence except that you are going to publish the resulting statistics. If you are according power, you build a linkage from the voter's action to public policy, and you let the voter know that that linkage is there and how it will work. A rational and interested voter will respond by thinking about what strategy has the highest expected value in terms of how that voter values the different outcomes in terms of policy. The semantics of the voter's chosen input to the linkage is solely that input's effect on the outcomes as expected and understood by the voter, no matter how much as you would like to model it as a direct expression of the voter's opinion. Yes, the voter's opinion feeds into the voter's decision, but it is not necessarily reflected in a straightforward way in the action of the voter upon the link. The voter's strategic evaluation and decision intervenes between the voter's opinion and her vote.
I contend that evaluating competing voting systems based on how accurately they reflect the voter's opinion should come secondary to evaluating them based on whether they accord the voters equal power.
It's not something I've really studied in great detail, but it certainly has a feel of "arbitrariness" about it. This obviously applies for score voting as well as approval. But this arbitrariness may be unavoidable if you want to allow abstentions. Other people on here would be in a better position to justify it..