Why Range Votes should not be Automatically "Normalized"
Call a range vote "normalized" if it scores at least one candidate with the
maximum allowed score, and at least one candidate with the minimum allowed score.
E.g, with an 0-to-9 allowed-score range
(0,1,3,3) and (2,4,5,6) are not normalized, while (0,1,6,9) is normalized.
Some people have suggested that all range ballots should automatically be normalized
(even for voters who submit non-normalized ballots) by the voting machine via an
appropriate rescaling, then those rescaled ballots should be counted.
I consider that a bad idea.
I recommend counting unaltered ballots.
Reasons:
Forcing range ballots to be normalized could not be accomplished by
a "dumb totalizing" voting machine but could be accomplished if it
were computerized. You thus would
preclude the option of using dumb machines.
Forcing normalization prevents voters from providing
intentionally-weak ballots.
Some voters might want to do that and you'd be thwarting their
desires.
I think if a voter provides a weak ballot intentionally, it is likely
they have a good
reason for acting that way.
In particular, consider the "kill the Jews" vote. Options are:
Kill all Jews, steal their assets, & distribute them to non-Jews.
Let them live.
...
Jews are a minority probably going to vote "A=0, B=9, C=...".
Non-Jews if they vote honestly in the own best personal interests
alone, would say "A>B" because they do get richer. But they might
honestly wish to provide a weak vote like
"A=5, B=4, ..." because getting a little richer does not matter all
that much compared to life and death. By forcing normalization you
would force all Jews to die, even if every voter
were entirely honest about their own personal utilities!
Unnormalized range voting in a
situation where every voter was entirely honest about personal
utilities and did so on a common utility scale (which requires some
voters to intentionally use weak votes) would
always yield the optimum-utility choice as the election winner.
However, of course in real life, many voters will not intentionally weaken their votes,
even though it would
be best for society that they did. Therefore the Jews still might die even with
unnormalized range voting. However, with unnormalized range voting they at least have a
hope of living provided that
such voter-honesty, when it exists, is not stanched by an overzealous
external normalizer.
And I believe there is a lot of honesty among real-world voters.
(You can easily see it in the data in range voting election studies.)
It would be a pity to damage or destroy whatever honesty comes our way.
Same thing in less dramatic form:
A group of friends might be voting on
whether to eat pizza or curry. 60% of the people might prefer a
curry but still find pizza acceptable, whereas 40% might prefer pizza and hate
curry. Toby Pereira thinks it's quite reasonable if a range vote awards victory to
pizza (but normalizing would prevent that).
Voters who wish to maximize their impact will already normalize
without need for normalization to be imposed.
If a range-voter provides some scores, one of them illegible, then
her ballot is
still usable on all the legible entries. Suppose she provides scores
(0, 1, 3, 9)
and the 9 is illegible. Would you say it is best to treat this as (0, 3, 9, X),
or to treat it as (0, 1, 3, X)?
Normalizing makes the voting system more complicated.
And this is not only more complicated for the counters, but also for the voters, since
it effectively adds extra options.
Example:
You might want to give three candidates 10, 6.67 and 3.33 out of
10 – but only integer scores are allowed. You can still achieve your goal
by awarding 1,
2 and 3 (or 3, 6, 9) and allowing the normalization to convert to 3.33, 6.67, 10.
But I don't think it's good to force voters to
have to think in this way.
It also forces a failure of "independence of irrelevant alternatives."
In practice it will largely fail anyway, but I think individuals
should be able to vote independently for each candidate.
Without imposing normalization, some worry and complain to me
that some voters will be "victimized"
because those voters did not realize the benefits of employing the full score-range on their
ballots. Of course, nobody who thus-worries and thus-complains is in that set
of people. I suspect this set of people is small. It will become even smaller
after range voting is widely adopted and taught in school,
and after the political parties, press pundits, etc
have blared for years about how you need to give candidate A the max and
candidate B the minimum, otherwise you're losing power.
The voters who really are victimized because they really do not see that
unnormalized ballots are weaker, will thus consist mainly of comparatively stupid
and/or ignorant voters. And this is not exactly rocket science and something
incredibly hard to see, so they really are pretty stupid and ignorant.
So the "problem" here is that range voting is a voting method
that artificially weakens the voting power of the quite-stupid and/or quite-ignorant.
To the extent that happens, I do not consider that to be a
"problem." I consider that, on average, to be an "advantage."
However, there are some who think the stupid and/or ignorant should have just as much voting
power as everybody else, whether they want it or not. Presumably, anybody who feels that way,
should demand compulsory voting under the present plurality
voting system. In most countries, including the USA, at present, people vote using
plurality and are allowed not to vote, which of course artificially weakens
their voting power (all the way to zero!). This in some cases is caused by a
person's ignorance and/or stupidity – they really do not comprehend that they'd
get more power if they voted. (Again, though, I suspect that the main cause is
not that people do not comprehend that.)
This "problem" could be overcome by forcing
everybody to vote,
whether they want to or not, and whether they have any knowledge about the election, or not.
Logically, anybody who feels normalization should be imposed for range voting, must feel that
voting should be compulsory. But this logical implication only
works in this direction. In the opposite direction:
even those who support compulsory voting, should not necessarily support imposed-normalization for
range voting. Why? Because one big advantage of compulsory voting is that it defeats
election-manipulation attempts by those in power who try to make it more difficult for the
wrong set of people to vote. The most famous example was the US South's "Jim Crow" era
(about 1900-1950) – a network of gimmicks and restrictions were created by rulemakers with
the goal of making it nearly impossible for black people to vote. This successfully
cut black voting by about 99%.
If voting were compulsory, Jim Crow would have been impossible.
But there is no such corresponding advantage for normalizing range votes –
black people are never going to be forced by some network of gimmicks to use
unnormalized range votes!