T.N.Tideman [in email]:
I agree that range is quite good if everyone is sincere, and not bad if everyone is strategic so that it becomes Approval. I agree that in practice you are likely to get the same amount of strategy on each side. What I don't like is the pretense that people are supposed to vote sincerely when people who understand what is going on have no qualms about voting strategically. If you are going to have a system in which knowledgeable people use what looks like approval voting, then in my view you should invite everyone to cast approval votes. But I am not happy with approval either. I think we agree that under approval the strategy that generally makes sense is to try to determine which two candidates are most likely to be ranked first and second, and then give a vote to the one you favor between these two, and to all candidates whom you prefer to that candidate. If I wanted to devise an evaluation of Approval that I regarded as informative, it would need to involve a statistical process that reflected this understanding of how approval works in practice. But even if that evaluation turned out well, it would make me uncomfortable to have a voting procedure in which getting the most out of one's vote required one to begin by figuring out who the two leading candidates were.