Home > Range voting

1 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.

2 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.

3 Example

Imagine an election for the capital of Tennessee, a state in the United States that is over 500 miles east-to-west, and only 110 miles north-to-south. In this vote, the candidates for the capital are Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. The population breakdown by metro area is as follows:

• Memphis: 826,330
• Nashville: 510,784
• Chattanooga: 285,536
• Knoxville: 335,749

If the voters cast their ballot based strictly on geographic proximity, the voters' sincere preferences might be as follows:

Suppose that voters were told to grant 1 to 4 points to each city such that their most liked choice(s) got 4 points, and least liked choice(s) got 1 point.

Nashville wins.

4 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.

5 See also

• List of democracy and elections-related topics

• Average rule
• Consensus decision-making
• Decision making
• Democracy
• Hot or NotHot or Not is a website that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. Founded in October, 2000, by two Silicon Valley-based engineers named James Hong and Jim Young, the site was originally called Am I Hot or Not – a real world example
• MajoritarianismMajoritarianism (often also called majority rule is a political philosophy or agenda which asserts that a majority (sometimes categorized by religion, language or some other identifying factor, sometimes not categorized at all) of the population is entitl (Majority rule)
• MinoritarianismMinoritarianism (also often called minority rule is a political philosophy or agenda which asserts that a segment of a country's population (sometimes categorized by religion, language or some other identifying factor) to which a minority of its citizens