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Gavin comments on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Interesting. Wouldn't Score Voting strongly incentivize voters to put 0s for major candidates other than their chosen one? It seems like there would always be a tension between voting strategically and voting honestly.
Delegable proxy is definitely a cool one. It probably does presuppose either a small population or advanced technology to run at scale. For my purposes (fiction) I could probably work around that somehow. It would definitely lead to a lot of drama with constantly shifting loyalties.
It seems like it would solve US 3rd party voting issues, e.g. if I prefer Libertarians to Democrats to Republicans, I could give the Libertarian candidate 10/10, the Democratic candidate 10/10, and the Republican candidate 0/10.
You'd presumably plan to do that so long as the Republican was in first or second place, but if polling started to show the Republican candidate in third place, you'd want to switch the Democratic candidate's score down to 0.
In the end, range voting boils down to approval voting, but with a trick to penalize people who are bad at math; and approval voting itself penalizes people who don't closely follow election polling.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that voting weights based on mathematical aptitude and knowledge of current events are necessarily bad things, and even if they were they're still probably not nearly as bad as the hysteresis effects of plurality voting.
It would absolutely be an improvement on the current system, no argument there.
There is some incentive to vote strategically, but depending on the range and the other candidate on offer you might be better off voting honestly. If there's a candidate you dislike strongly, and a major candidate you only mildly dislike, you might give your favorite a 10, the mild dislike a 3, and the major dislike a 0, just to reduce the major dislike's chances. The worst case scenario, which you describe, is called bullet voting, and is basically identical to our current system, but if even a small proportion vote honestly it can improve the results. The researcher who made the graph at the bottom of rangevoting.org ran computer simulations of voter preferences compared with candidate values, and found that something like 10% of voters given their honest preference can improve results. I do recommend the book if you want to know more.
I am very interested in delegable proxy, although it seems potentially dangerous and I think if it were implemented it would need to be tempered with some less democratic devices, but it could certainly make for some interesting drama.