Talk:Ranked voting

Should cardinal methods be considered ranked methods?

This article is about voting systems that use ranked ballots, which can also include voting systems that use interval scale ballots, i.e. cardinal voting systems

I'd like to see if this is a controversial statement among the Electowiki community. To me, it seems like a bad idea to include rated methods under ranked methods; many people already mistakenly conflate the two categories (i.e. they'll say "rank the candidates from 0 to 5" when explaining Score voting), and this seems to only further add confusion. I think the connection between ranked and rated methods is worth capturing, since a rated ballot is really a ranked ballot with certain constraints and features, but this doesn't seem to be the way to mention that point. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 20:02, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

I think it needs a wording improvement. What comes to my mind is: "This article is about voting systems that use ranked ballots, although sometimes cardinal voting systems are referred to as using ranked ballots even though they actually use interval scale ballots." Rough wording, but that's the general idea. VoteFair (talk) 01:20, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

I would go a step futher to distinguish them. I saw the statement above and condidered changing it just yesterday. There are at least three ways I can think of the statement that "Cardinal ballots are a subset of Ordinal ballots" is wrong. In terms of number /group theory they are distinct and do not share overlapping theory. In terms of information theory Cardinal ballots capture more informaiton so at best an argument that "Ordinal ballots are a subset of Cardinal ballots" could be made but I would not think that was useful. In terms of social choice theory it considered different ballot types. To make a statement like this would at least require a source which uses the terms in this way. --Dr. Edmonds (talk) 05:07, 13 April 2020 (UTC)