Voting Schemes

I was quite fascinated by some of the new voting schemes based on game theory, but now I think they may not actually help much at all. One example is to have everyone rank the candidates in order of preference. The preferences would then be calculated. This is extremely simplified, of course. My point is that there are these new types of voting models and the math seems pretty solid.

But candidates are not interchangeable, nor is there any objective standard; for instance, the difference between the 1st and 2nd preference may be extremely small for some people, but very large for others. The model doesn't take this into account. The voter's choices are made based on subjective valuations which can't be accurately reflected.

The other thing that bothers me? Most voters are so uneducated that it's better for them to stay home now! If we make voting more effective, don't we just magnify the problem? The average voter now just develops some half-baked impression of a candidate based on media coverage or advertisement. My guess is that most people would be ranking based on little more than name recognition and a few emotional impressions.

I guess it's possible that these new models would be more accurate than the current one despite these concerns. I would like to see someone's reasoning on these issues though.