Should Mild Preferences Have Equal Weight?

[EnderIII]

Check out the wiki link to range voting:

Wiki Range Voting
Center for range voting
and this:

MATHEMATICS and DEMOCRACY
Warren D. Smith
Center for Range Voting

1. We argue that "range voting" is the best single-winner voting
method among all commonly proposed alternatives. One argument is the
"Bayesian Regret" yardstick - our measurements and calculations
indicate
that if range voting were adopted instead of the currently most-used
system, "plurality voting," humanity's lot would improve by an amount
comparable to or exceeding the improvement achieved by switching from
undemocratic forms of government to democracy. Estimates in
http://rangevoting.org/LivesSaved.html suggest every day sooner we get
range voting is expected to save 5000 lives.
2. We argue (by analysing an explicit political strategy to get it)
range voting is, in fact, an obtainable dream.
3. Range voting has been used in hundreds of trillions of elections
over the last 20 million years. (Yes, I am aware fewer than 20 billion
humans ever lived. Hint: these elections do not involve humans.)
4. We shall also discuss some other mathematical ideas for improving
democracy such as the "shortest splitline" gerrymandering-abolition
plan, and a plan by Ronald Rivest (as repaired by me) for low-tech
fraud-proof secret ballot voting.

Speaker Bio

MIT math & physics double BS 1984;
Princeton Applied Math PhD 1988;
has worked at Bell Labs, NEC, Temple University;
founded Center for Range Voting in 2005.