[ExI] Fwd: elections again; was [Time Magazine: Person of the Year: Putin(!),my vote instead: Anna Politkovskaja]

[daniel radetsky]

Andrew:

I'm not sure what you mean by the claim that range voting is not immune to
the basic problems of ordinal voting schemes. The G-S, D-S, and Arrow
theorems explicitly do not apply. I'm also unsure of the justification for
and the significance of saying that range voting collapses into conventional
voting schemes most of the time. Even if range voting did collapse into
scheme X almost always, it would still be as good as scheme X almost always.
Do you believe that range voting is inferior to scheme X (where X = your
preferred scheme) in those situations where it does not collapse into X? I
doubt this. If you do believe it is inferior, how do answer the theoretical
claims of the proponents of range voting (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting#Properties)?

I do not see how proposing range voting contradicts the principles of "one
man, one vote" or "every vote counts equally." But in any case, culture is
not some fixed constant, but something which we can change and which we have
changed for as long as we have existed. If proposal X is better for people
but culturally unacceptable, the solution is to fix the culture. Obviously
this is hard, but that's no excuse for not doing it, even if you fail or do
not fully succeed. Likewise, if people choose voting systems to ensure
certain voting rules, this is just to say that we chose our system in order
to guarantee that we would have our system. This is another telltale sign
that there is an assumption here which needs challenging.
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