Range Voting - Strategy

Strategy

In most cases, ideal range voting strategy for well-informed voters is identical to ideal approval voting strategy, and a voter would want to give his least and most favorite candidates a minimum and a maximum score, respectively. If one candidate's backers engaged in this tactic and other candidates' backers cast sincere rankings for the full range of candidates, then the tactical voters would have a significant advantage over the rest of the electorate. When the population is large and there are two obvious and distinct front-runners, tactical voters seeking to maximize their influence on the result would give a maximum rating to their preferred candidate, and a minimum rating to the other front-runner; these voters would then give minimum and maximum scores to all other candidates so as to maximize expected utility.

However, there are examples in which voting maximum and minimum scores for all candidates is not optimal. Exit poll experiments have shown that voters tend to vote more sincerely for candidates they perceive have no chance of winning. Thus range voting may yield higher support for third party and independent candidates, unless those candidates become viable, than other common voting methods, creating what has been called the "nursery effect".

Range voting advocates argue that range voting systems (including approval voting) give no reason to ever dishonestly rank a less-preferred candidate over a more-preferred one in 3-candidate elections. However, detractors respond that it provides motivation to rank a less-preferred and more-preferred candidate equally or near-equally (i.e., both 0-1 or both 98-99). This could lead to undemocratic results if different segments of the population used strategy at significantly different rates. (Note that traditional first-past-the-post voting forces all candidates except one to be ranked equally, so that all voters are compressing their preferences equally.)