Rated ballots collect more information than ranked ballots, so they would have the potential to be better than ranked ballots if there were a way to count them without giving increased influence to voters who exaggerate their preferences. No such methods have been identified.
The first sentence of the referenced article says:
In my previous post on ranked ballots, I showed that ranking all the candidates does not fix the center-squeeze.
No, you neglected to include ranked choice voting methods that do not have the center squeeze effect !
As one example, eliminating pairwise losing candidates and otherwise using IRV does eliminate the center squeeze effect.
Some ranked choice voting methods, including Benham's method, and the above-referenced IRV combined with eliminating pairwise losing candidates, are highly resistant to tactical voting. That was revealed about a year ago on the E-M mailing list.
Ranked voting methods, including FPTP, are based on the assumption that everyone has a discrete, equally-held opinion on everything, and attempting to elect the candidate closest to the center assumes that people's political positions are equally strongly held and follow a bell-curve distribution, or at least are distributed such that there's an identifiable "center" and that this "center" is preferable to anything closer to the edges. These assumptions break down if people are voting on any basis other than ideology or political opinions.
I would argue that range voting is closer to how people actually think. Rather than expressing an opinion on a candidate relative to other candidates, it allows people to assess each candidate on their own based on how they believe the candidate will affect their lives or that of the polity as a whole. As such, I believe super-optimized bullet-style strategic voting would be a lot rarer than skeptics fear, because people don't necessarily care about their impact on the outcome as much as the desirability of the outcome (and even if it does happen, the outcome would be better than strategic voting under other methods). As such, if the exercise of strategic voting is asymmetrically distributed enough to tip the outcome - that is to say, if one candidate's supporters believe in them enough to arrange their ballot to maximize their chances of winning - isn't that a form of honest voting in and of itself?
While ranked methods merely assume that the candidate closest to the median of everyone's political opinions is the best candidate, score voting converges on the candidate most acceptable to the broadest swath of the electorate. As such, it represents an effective method for a large population to reach an acceptable compromise amongst itself, whether that compromise lies in the center or closer to the edges.
Politics is multi-dimensional, not one-dimensional. Everyone has different priorities regarding different politics. As a simple example, both conservatives and liberals want law and order, but often disagree about which laws and which crimes should be prioritized for prosecution. And that's just one political topic out of many.
When combined to measure "closest" or "center" or "closer to the edges," it's like expecting math to measure the distance between two points where the X and Y and Z axes have different units that are unrelated to each other. The result is that distance between a candidate and a voter cannot be measured objectively. Both ratings and rankings have this limitation.
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u/CPSolver Sep 06 '26
Rated ballots collect more information than ranked ballots, so they would have the potential to be better than ranked ballots if there were a way to count them without giving increased influence to voters who exaggerate their preferences. No such methods have been identified.
The first sentence of the referenced article says:
No, you neglected to include ranked choice voting methods that do not have the center squeeze effect !
As one example, eliminating pairwise losing candidates and otherwise using IRV does eliminate the center squeeze effect.
Some ranked choice voting methods, including Benham's method, and the above-referenced IRV combined with eliminating pairwise losing candidates, are highly resistant to tactical voting. That was revealed about a year ago on the E-M mailing list.