Top Ten Virtues of Range Voting

  1. EXPRESSIVE: You give information about all candidates not just one, and QUANTITATIVELY – not just who you prefer, but how much.
  2. ENCOURAGES HONESTY NOT STRATEGY: Your score for candidate C in no way affects A vs. B battle. So you can give your honest opinion of C without fear of "wasting your vote" or hurting A.
  3. Voter never has any incentive to vote someone over ("betray") his/her favorite. (May sound like an obvious and easy criterion, but very few other voting systems obey it!) This should decrease the importance of cash.
  4. UNAFFECTED BY CANDIDATE CLONING: If A has "clones" A2, A3, that neither hurts nor helps them, unlike in the old "plurality voting" system where the clones "split the vote" and lose; and also unlike "Borda voting" where a party assures victory merely by running enough clones. No more bitter emnity between alike candidates.
  5. BREAKS STRANGLEHOLD OF SELF-REINFORCING 2-PARTY DOMINATION SO VOTERS GET MORE CHOICES: Plurality & IRV voting yield 2-party domination. Range voting experimentally yields much greater support for 3rd parties than "approval voting." Having more parties should also decrease the importance of gerrymandering, decrease predictability below 98%, and increase interest & turnout.
  6. ANY VOTING MACHINE FOR MULTIPLE PLURALITY CONTESTS, i.e. all extant, can handle range voting. (This for "single digit" range voting i.e. with scores in {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,X}.) IRV and Condorcet voting can't say that.
  7. If all voting is strategic, then approximately (a) maximizes number of "PLEASANTLY SURPRISED" voters and (b) ELECTS BEATS-ALL WINNERS whenever they exist.
  8. FEWER "SPOILED BALLOTS" and LESS FRAUD. In plurality voting, an accidental hanging chad or overvote can cause your vote to be discarded. With range voting, a hanging chad causes only part of your vote to get discarded (converted to "blank") with the rest – your opinions of all the other candidates – still operational. There's no such thing as an "overvote" since expressing opinions about all candidates is the idea; there's no wrong way to fill in a ballot. RV also reduces risk of TIES.
  9. UNIQUELY BEST among all common single-winner election methods as measured by BAYESIAN REGRET. (Holds for all 720 tried combinations of the following: number V of voters and N of candidates with V>N>2, several kinds of "utility generators", several amounts of "voter ignorance," and with either "honest" or "strategic" voters.)
  10. HUGE POSITIVE IMPACT: "Democracy" improved over monarchy and feudalism. Bayesian regret measurements say just switching from plurality to range will cause at least as much further regret reduction!
  11. HONEYBEES & ANTS have run trillions of elections over the last 20-50 million years to make hive relocation decisions. Under severe evolutionary pressure, they came up with... range voting!

Return to main page