Talk:Ranked voting: Difference between revisions

::::::: This is not a very important point, so first off, you are free to skip the discussion on it. But I just want to try to clarify it if possible. So, as an example, let's say a voter maximally prefers A to B. On a rated ballot, it is clear as to how they should express this: put A at the max score and B at the min score. But now let's say they also prefer B to C to some extent. This preference can't be mentioned on a rated ballot, since there is no further room for differentiation when you put the more-preferred candidate at the min score. I am mentioning the idea of cardinal pairwise matchups because it'd allow you to do this, and am further pointing out that a ranked ballot is really equivalent to always putting your more-preferred candidate at the max score and the less-preferred candidate at the min score in each matchup. Thus, this seems a better way to categorize rated and ranked ballots to me than to say that ranked is a subcategory of rated; a ranked ballot doesn't prevent the voter in my example from voting both A>B and B>C while having maximally strong preferences in both matchups. To be clear, this isn't an argument for "ranked ballots are better than rated ballots", but just pointing out that they both capture certain pieces of information that would be lost by converting to the other i.e. a Bernie>Biden>Trump voter with strong preferences between all 3 may not be able to honestly score Biden in between Bernie and Trump without weakening at least one of the matchups, and likewise, ranked ballots can't detect if you only slightly prefer A to B. The generalized cardinal pairwise approach allows one to express both weak preferences in some matchups, and strong preferences in others, so that is why I'm saying it's a useful theoretical concept to help unify rated and ranked ballots conceptually. It is not practical of course to have a voter fill out each and every matchup, but approximations can be done, such as allowing a voter to rate the candidates and then say if they want the weak preferences to be processed, or for each preference to be treated as maximally strong. This is why I mentioned Score being a subset of Condorcet: if you give A 100% support, B 80%, and C 0% on a rated ballot, that is equal to giving 0.2 votes to A>B and 0.8 votes B>C in a Condorcet method. If these preferences are treated as ranked, though, then it is equivalent to giving 1 vote in each matchup to the more-preferred candidate. Sorry for the lengthy response. Edit: It may help to point you to academic articles on this; I don't really understand them well, but I believe the generalized cardinal pairwise preferences I'm speaking about are called "fuzzy pairwise comparisons" in the academic literature. For example, (PDF) https://tarjomefa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/3073-engilish.pdf. Again, I don't understand it all, but I think it gives you a rough idea of what I'm talking about. [[User:BetterVotingAdvocacy|BetterVotingAdvocacy]] ([[User talk:BetterVotingAdvocacy|talk]]) 03:30, 14 April 2020 (UTC)