>This is a pretty strong claim that needs strong evidence to counter. Especially considering there's lots of works demonstrating the usefulness of this informat

>This is a pretty strong claim that needs strong evidence to counter. Especially considering there's lots of works demonstrating the usefulness of this information. My claim: "Data X does not exist". Your reply: "Data X would be very useful!". Note that your reply does not actually refute what I said. As for support, IMHO, I think the burden should be on score supporters to prove the data exists. All my experience talking to people is that almost nobody has a real score. They have candidates they'll never support, a few they may waver between, and eventually they settle on some ordinal preference. >If the voter truly has no preference of Romney over Biden, then yeah, that makes sense. Err.. I think you meant the voter has Romney > Biden, right? Or you have misread me here. >Cardinal systems you can do any of the following: 1) Trump > Romney >> Biden, 2) Trump >> Romney > Biden, 3) Trump >> Romney = Biden, 4) Trump > Romney = Biden. There's a whole slew of permutations that are available at no additional cost... Most of these preference either don't matter (Why should a >> vote matter more than >), or create more problems then they solve (= preferences create actual draws. I don't mind making voters choose an ordering). >In fact, ordering candidates in a cardinal system is perfectly valid and will become equivalent to an ordered system. I got that, my point is that it creates a lot of other effects, like giving Biden a reason to run Sibyls. --- Your general assumption is that elections are a large public survey and we need to get max data and then average it out. I strongly disagree with that model. Most people have vague preferences. Scores don't really exist and we end up with GIGO.