[conlang_learners] Now or in September?

[Jim Henry]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Philip Newton<philip.newton at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 22:33, Jim Henry<jimhenry1973 at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 2009/7/13 Larry Sulky <larrysulky at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> How about weighted voting? Each voter gets a sizable number of votes -- say
>>> 20, or 100 -- to apportion as they like amongst as many of the nominees as
>>> they like. Then just count votes. This lets a voter convey not only
>>> preference, but strength of preference:
>>
>>> Does a voting scheme like this work in real life? I have no experience; it's
>>> just an idea.
>>
>> This is similar to but not exactly the same as
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
>>
>> Does anyone else like that idea better than instant-runoff voting?
>
> It seems to me more complex than is necessary.

I'm not sure it's more complex -- it may actually be simpler than IRV,
at least from the vote-counter's perspective, though possibly slightly
more complex on the voter's end.

The main way it differs from IRV is in voting strategy.   With IRV,
once you list your most preferred option in first place, listing other
less preferred options in second place and so forth doesn't hurt the
probability of your favorite winning, but it does increase the
probability of something acceptable to you winning.  With range
voting, or the variation of it that Larry proposed, you have to choose
between helping your favorite option as much as possible, or hedging
your bets by spreading your votes out among several acceptable
options, to minimize the probability of something you don't want being
selected.   If, with Larry's range voting proposal, you decide you
like Foolang best among the nominees, and give it all 100 of your
votes, but Foolang turns out to be in third or fourth place and the
top two vote-getters Barlang (which you don't like) and Quxlang (which
you like reasonably well although not as well as Foolang) differ by
less than 100 votes, you would have been better off splitting your
votes between Foolang and Quxlang.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/