Range voting Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Range voting, or average voting, or cardinal ratings is a voting system used for single or multiple-seat elections. It is also used on the web - for rating movies (Internet Movie Database), comments (Kuro5hin), and many other things.

Table of contents

1 Voting 2 Counting the Votes 3 Example 4 Strategy 5 See also

Voting

For each candidate, each voter expresses the utility of that candidate's election to them in the form of a number. In "pure" range voting, each voter may give any candidate any real number, but as the potential for tactical voting is huge, most systems use some bounds. For example, each voter might give a real number between -1 and 1, or an integer between 1 and 10.

Range voting in which only two different votes may be submitted (0 and 1, for example) is equivalent to approval voting.

Range voting satisfies the monotonicity criterion.

Counting the Votes

The scores for each candidate are summed, and the candidates with the highest sums are declared the winners.

Another method of counting is to find the median score of each candidate, and elect the candidate with the highest median score.

Example

Suppose that voters were told to grant 2 points to any city they preferred, 1 point to any city they could accept, and 0 points to any city they do not want as the capitol. And then suppose they prefer only their first choice, but the next two are acceptable alternatives, and the last one is not acceptable.

City	Memphis	Nashville	Chattanooga	Knoxville	Total
Memphis	84	0	0	0	84
Nashville	42	52	15	17	126
Chattanooga	42	26	30	17	115
Knoxville	0	26	15	34	75

This shows that Nashville wins, and that everyone would accept Chattanooga as an alternative.

If the voters granted 2 points to their top two choices, 1 point to their third choice, and no points to their last choice, the outcome would be:

City	Memphis	Nashville	Chattanooga	Knoxville	Total
Memphis	84	0	0	0	84
Nashville	84	52	15	17	168
Chattanooga	42	52	30	34	158
Knoxville	0	26	30	34	90

Again, Nashville wins.

Strategy

In general, the optimal strategy for range voting is to vote it identically to approval voting, so that all candidates are given either the maximum score or the minimum score. For more detailed strategies, see approval voting.

Range voting assumes that voters are actually expressing their personal feelings rather than doing everything they can to cause their most favored outcomes.

See also

• List of democracy and elections-related topics

• Average rule
• Consensus decision-making
• Decision making
• Democracy
• Hot or Not – a real world example
• Majoritarianism (Majority rule)
• Minoritarianism

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