Range voting

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Range voting (RV) is, in the most general sense, a voting system in which each voter assigns a score to each of the possible choices for a given decision. (Wikipedia defines it strictly in terms of voting for candidates in a formal election, but it need not be restricted to this usage.) The score must be within a predetermined range, so that everyone knows what the numbers mean (does "10" mean "acceptable" or "I love this"?).

My preferred system goes from -10 to +10, so that it's more obvious which numbers represent a vote against rather than for. Ten possibilities on either side of zero (neutral = don't-care ≈ abstain) also make for a relatively intuitive, simple, clickable user interface (no typing needed). The +/- symmetry seems rather essential to me (despite some puzzling objections), but I'm open to a finer granularity (perhaps allowing users to manually enter in-between numbers via a hidden "advanced" interface -- which also opens up the possibility of having a coarser granularity by default, because anyone who wanted finer granularity could still access it via the hidden interface).

Advantages

The key advantage to range voting, as I understand it, is that it more or less completely does away with the aggregation anomalies created by coarser voting systems, including:

  • the two party "system"
    • minority rule (the winner may only have the support of a small percentage)
    • "strategic voting" (voting for "the lesser of two evils")
    • "vote splitting" (a majority position losing its representation by being split across two or more candidates)
    • the "spoiler" effect (3rd-party voters are punished)
  • gerrymandering is rendered ineffective
  • 3rd-most-popular winners

Disadvantages

The main disadvantage of RV is that it involves the aggregation of much more data than traditional voting techniques. (This is an unavoidable consequence of what is also its greatest basic strength: the fact that it gives the system much more information about what each voter wants, making it possible to come much closer to satisfying everyone.) In the internet era, however, the difficulty posed by this added complexity vanishes to insignificance.

The other disadvantage to RV is that people aren't used to it, and tend to object to it on the basis of misunderstandings or false assumptions.

Objections

CRV has a good collection of objections, and answers for each. (I may add more information here about any objections that seem to be especially popular.)

Links

Reference

Projects

Videos