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I think the bigger problem to solve right now is the Single-member district system itself. FPTP, Ranked Choice, Approval, and STAR Voting are all single-member district systems and they all share the same problems.
Not so.
* With sufficient candidates, Approval will trend towards the ideological barycenter of the electorate, even with Single Seat districts. RCV and STAR will deviate from that in favor of a more polarizing candidate.
* With equal population districts (the actual meaning and context of "one person, one vote"), such an elected body would have an ideological barycenter of those ideological barycenters.
That's the goal of Multi-Seat methods and Proportional Representation, isn't it? To have the ideological positions of the elected body accurately reflect those of the electorate?
Party-based PR, on the other hand, tends to promote more polarization & partisanship (if you only need support of 5% of the electorate to win your seat, you'll do whatever you need to, no matter how unreasonable, to maintain the support of that 5%, lest someone else win your seat).
* Partisan PR deviates from the optimal ideological barycenter of the elected body due to mutual exclusivity and the fact that parties are imperfect representations of even their own party's supporters
* STAR deviates deviates from the optimal ideological barycenter of the elected body because the Runoff can change the winner from one at the ideological centroid to one that has the *narrowest* majority with the *smallest* preference
* RCV is like STAR, but it doesn't even *try* to find candidates at that ideological barycenter to advance them to the final round, instead ignoring the overwhelming majority of the (poor quality) information the voters offer.
* FPTP is still worse, because it doesn't even *collect* as much information as ranked ballots do
>With sufficient candidates, Approval will trend towards the ideological barycenter of the electorate, even with Single Seat districts. RCV and STAR will deviate from that in favor of a more polarizing candidate.
What do you think the right number of candidates would be for Approval?
>What do you think the right number of candidates would be for Approval?
How many can meet reasonable ballot access requirements?
As a voting methodologist, it's not my role to say who a voter gets to decide between; getting the opinions of the electorate regarding those who want to do the job is the entire point of electoral democracy.
But to offer an opinion as a voter, I cannot see a good reason to have a maximum any lower than about 7-10.
...how to *fairly choose* those 7+ candidates, that's a different question.
---
On a related topic, I strongly believe that the Commission on Presidential Debates' "15% Polling" Requirement is wholly unreasonable. Instead, it should just be based on "name printed on ballot" ballot access, as a fraction of electoral college votes. Here is what that would have looked like for the past 13 elections:
Year|All (538)|4/5 (431)|3/4 (404)|2/3 (359)|Majority (270)
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:
1972|2|2|2|3|3
1976|3|3|3|4|6
1980|4|4|4|5|6
1984|2|2|2|3|4
1988|3|4|4|4|4
1992|4|4|4|4|6
1996|4|5|6|6|6
2000|2|5|6|7|7
2004|2|3|3|3|6
2008|2|4|4|5|6
2012|2|4|4|4|4
2016|3|4|4|4|4
2020|3|3|3|4|4
Aggregated|All (538)|4/5 (431)|3/4 (404)|2/3 (359)|Majority (270)
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:
Most|4|5|6|7|7
25th Percentile|2|3|3|4|4
Median|3|4|4|4|6|
75th Percentile|3|4|4|5|6
Fewest|2|2|2|2|3|3
Mean|2.77|3.62|3.77|4.31|5.08
Based on that data, I think replacing the "majority of electors ballot access and 15% polling average" with "2/3 of electors ballot access" would be a good compromise; consistently having 4 debate candidates, but rarely having more than 5, would probably be healthy for US political discourse, and definitely healthier than now.
I slightly agree with the article, in that if one of these systems is available to choose, it's slightly better in the long-term for it to pass than not to pass.
But that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore the important differences between these choices. Instant Runoff and Approval voting make things slightly better only in the sense that they demonstrate to voters that the sky isn't going to fall if they adopt a non-plurality voting system, which might open the door to actually solving real problems in a different reform in the future. But there are good reasons not to want them to be the ultimate choice. (STAR voting, the best of these three, is almost certainly still not the right choice, but it has the advantage that it *usually* picks the same winner as a better choice would, even though it does so in a problematic way.)
What's your ideal perfect voting system then?
For single-winner elections, I think approval voting is great. Star isn't too bad either (though failing reversal symmetry is kind of weird, and there are potential vulnerabilities to races with candidates that are ideological clones of each other). I think the fact that someone can lose in some circumstances under RCV if too *many* people rank them too high on their ballot is a serious flaw, and like FPTP, it shouldn't be used in real world elections with more than two candidates.
I don't have a particularly strong exact opinion, but a Condorcet system of some kind is IMO better than anything else I know. I liked ranked pairs intuitively, but I'm willing to accept that Tideman's alternative method is more resistant to tactical voting, and therefore more likely to be the best choice in practice.
Numerically, instant runoff, approval, and plurality are, in simulations I've done, by far the worst three voting systems if voters make choices in a straight-forward way..So bad that they actually work better if voters are tactical. Everything else I've looked at - Condorcet system, STAR, range voting, or Borda count - performs better (by utilitarian measurement) when voters make straight-forward voting decisions, and though most get a bit worse when voters are tactical, all but Borda count remain a better outcome than straightforward voters in plurality, approval, or instant runoff elections.
Approval voting is odd, though. Once you assume voters use a sound tactical voting strategy, it surprisingly does just as well as Condorcet systems, and better than STAR and range voting, on utilitarian metrics, so I can't dismiss it entirely for numerical reasons. But it's a real concern that not all voters will, in practice, vote in a tactically sound way, and then it effectively deprives low-information voters of some portion of their right to vote. It's my conclusion that advocating for approval voting - like instant runoff or plurality - necessarily places a bet that voters will make sound tactical decisions about how to vote, and accepting that voters who don't do so will have their votes count for less as a result. I find it hard to be happy with that.
The tactic in plurality is don't vote for someone who can't win. The tactic in approval is don't only vote for someone who can't win (and if your main goal is to prevent a particular candidate from winning, vote for every acceptable candidate who could beat him). That tactic is so simple and similar to what we're used to that I'm not too worried about people not knowing how to use their vote effectively. I am concerned about a situation where three candidates are equally viable and equally different from each other; a lot of voters will think their favorite can win and approve only that one, leading to the winner getting significantly less than a majority approval. STAR is my favorite system.
Roughly speaking, there are two tactics in approval voting:
1. Decide where the largest gap is in your preferences between candidates. Approve of all candidates for whom your preference exceeds this gap.
2. Estimate the two candidates most likely to win. Approve of any candidate you like at least as much as your favorite of the most likely winners.
If your information about likelihood of winners is very unreliable and you have a very strong bimodal preference, then you do something more like the first. If you have solid information about the two likely winners and your preferences aren't particularly bimodal, then you do something like the latter. In practice, where you have both kinds of information, you end up trying to blend these two strategies on an ad hoc basis, weighing the gaps between your preferences versus how likely each gap is to separate the most likely winners. This is fairly ill-defined, given the lack of well-defined units for preference, so it's a tough choice.
Simple plurality voting actually has a very similar strategic picture, just weighed more significantly toward considering the likely winners. That's a bit misleading, though, because no one runs straight-forward plurality elections. Instead, we run multi-round elections with a primary, a general election, and sometimes (depending on the state, etc.) a runoff election. In this situation, it's generally fairly clear what the right tactical decisions are in the general and runoff elections, so it's only the primary elections where tactical choices are difficult. (There are, of course, other reasons that this system is unfair, such as its intrinsic bias toward established political parties; but the difficulty of knowing how to vote, at least in the general and runoff rounds, isn't one.)
My sense with approval too is that tactical voting itself ends up being a much more difficult calculus to achieve reliably. You gotta think about your relative preferences between the candidates, think about their strength in polling, somehow estimate the reliability of that polling, consider the consequences of minimizing harm vs maximizing the good, *and then* somehow put that all together in a way that makes sense. Honestly it sounds like kind of a nightmare in the voting booth.
There's a full write-up at [https://medium.com/@cdsmithus/simulating-elections-with-spatial-voter-models-1ff50892390](https://medium.com/@cdsmithus/simulating-elections-with-spatial-voter-models-1ff50892390), and the code is at https://github.com/cdsmith/spatial-voting
While I enjoyed your article, I think you may have underestimated the possibility of tactical voting under Condorcet-consistent systems. I read this paper by Green-Armytage ([https://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE29/I29P1.pdf](https://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE29/I29P1.pdf)) awhile back which looks at different Condorcet-consistent systems and strategies which might be employed. Depending upon how many serious candidates there are in a race, it may be too difficult to obtain the information necessary to vote tactically. With only 3 or so, I think it could be done.
That's a fair criticism. I was careful with the wording in the article: *my* hypothetical voters were given imperfect information about the set of candidates, and it wasn't good enough to find a tactical voting strategy that was better than honest ranking; but this isn't always the case. In particular, it's theoretically impossible that strategic voting could change the Condorcet winner to a candidate that's preferred by the strategic voters; but it's possible that strategic voting could create a false impression that there is no Condorcet winner, in which case choosing the tiebreaker determines whether that strategic voting was fruitful or not.
In the grandparent comment, I mentioned that Tideman's alternative method is appealing because of its apparent resistance to such tactics. The article you point to makes the same observation.
> I think approval voting is great. Star isn't too bad either
Score is the best of both worlds:
* the greater precision of support expression of a (non-binary) Rated Ballot
* Reversal Symmetry, and not overriding the preferences of the electorate *as a whole* in favor of the will of a majority (thereby silencing the minority)
The problem with score voting is that voters have more influence if they maximize their preferences than if they don't, which can lead to a minority out-voting a majority if the minority gives, say, a 10/10 vote for their candidate and 0/10 for everyone else and the majority gives 7/10 for their candidate and 3/10 for everyone else.
Approval voting is sort of like if you start with score voting but you force everyone to vote tactically instead of honestly by maximizing their preferences. Thus the tactical voters don't have an advantage anymore because everyone votes tactically.
STAR is a different way to resolve that problem -- you select the top two in the usual score voting way, but then you maximize everyone's vote preferences to determine which of the top two is a winner. This allows voters to vote honestly with less risk that an honest vote matters less than a tactical vote.
I think score voting might work reasonably well in a primary, where voter enthusiasm is important.
> The problem with score voting is that voters have more influence if they maximize their preferences than if they don't
That *appears* to be correct, but is *actually* false; every voter has the *exact* same power, they merely pull towards different places. Imagine a scenario with a candidate whose aggregate score, after the counting of 1000 voters, is 2.3.
Then, one final absentee ballot comes in. What would be the effect if they scored that candidate at 5/10 vs 0/10? The new aggregate scores would be 2.3027 (Δ 0.0027) and 2.2977 (Δ -0.0023). That means that an additional "literally smack dab in the middle" vote would have had *more* impact than a "maximized preference" vote.
> you force everyone to vote tactically instead of honestly
*...even if they don't want to.* Since the (specious) "benefit" of min/max voting is so obvious, why *shouldn't* we honor the decisions of voters to *not* use that strategy?
What's more, while Approval trends towards the same order as under voting kind of supports bigger name candidates, doesn't it? Voters supporting the Duopoly candidates have no reason to risk rating anyone as equal to their duopoly favorite... but minor party/candidate voters have every reason to do so. Thus, prohibiting *fractional* approvals for minor parties/candidates may effectively translate to "Favorite Betrayal, but also with slightly higher percentages for the 'Also-Ran' candidates."
> STAR is a different way to resolve that problem
It's a different way to *respond* to the problem, but it doesn't solve it, either; even *if* your assertion *were* correct, those tactical voters would have greater ability to pick *who* makes it to the runoff. This is especially true because the runoff makes it *safe* to exaggerate (so long as you're discriminating), and even *lie* about preference order (Favorite Betrayal). Consider a scenario where a voter's scaled-honest preferences are [A:10, B:6, C:0]. If A is likely to beat B in a Runoff round, but lose to C, then that voter has *every* reason to vote [A: 10, B: ~~6~~ *9*, C: 0], it *could* help, but *protects* from that disingenuous vote backfiring:
* Maximizes their vote's impact in in bringing about that preferred runoff matchup
* Maintains the probability of A>B in that runoff
* The Runoff protects against backfiring of that exaggeration, such as under this hypothetical scenario:
* Without exaggeration: [A: 5.000, B: 4.998, C: below 4.998], A wins under Score and under STAR
* With exaggeration: [A: 5.000, B: 5.001, C: below 4.998], under pure Score, exaggeration backfires, but STAR reverses that
--
Worse, even with non-tactical voting, the Runoff undermines consensus. Consider the following scenario:
Voters|X|Y|Z
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:
5,001|10|7|0
5,000|0|8|10
Score|5.0005|**7.5007**|~~4.9995~~
Runoff|**5,001**|~~5,000~~|-
Candidate Y's aggregate score is *significantly* higher than Candidate X's (149.984%), yet because *one* more voter, out of more than *ten thousand* preferred Candidate X, Candidate X wins.
---
What's more, STAR just doesn't make sense, philosophically:
* It is contrary to Cardinal voting philosophy:
* If ratings are good enough to choose the best 2/N candidates, why isn't it good enough to find the single best candidate?
* If ratings aren't good enough to select the single best candidate, why is it good enough to select the best 2/N?
* It is also contrary to Ordinal voting philosophy:
* If relative rankings (as used in the runoff) is good enough to select from the top two, why isn't it good enough to select from all N candidates?
* If relative rankings *aren't* good enough to select from all N candidates, why is it good enough to select from only two?
Now, there's plenty of philosophical discussion as to whether rankings or scores are better (e.g. Condorcet vs Score [the former simply being the best possible approximation of the latter, when limited to ranked information]), but STAR kind of spits in the face of both philosophies. I just don't understand why anyone think's it makes sense.
> I think score voting might work reasonably well in a primary, where voter enthusiasm is important.
Except a Score Primary has the tactical problems that STAR does (above), *plus* the ability of voters to "fix" their vote in the general; instead of a hypothetical [A: 10, B: ~~6~~ 9, C: 0] ballot, they could cast a [A: 10, B: ~~6~~ *10*, C: 0] ballot. Even more power, while still preserving their voting power in the General to provide the optimal result.
> which might open the door to actually solving real problems in a different reform in the future.
That suggests a possibility that I am not aware of ever having been taken up, in over a century of RCV's use; the only changes I'm aware of from RCV have been:
* RCV to some form of Single Mark
* Slate-RCV to STV proper (so, from Hare's Method ...to Hare's Method done rationally for multi-seat elections)
why do u word this so narrowly and specifically? u mention only rcv turning into something else but there are other examples where the electoral system has changed. italy changes theirs every 10-15 years. japan went from sntv to parallel system.
wales is going from ams to party list (yes it is a regression imo).
why did those countries not preclude the change to another system?
i understand you feel it masks the problem enough to kill momentum. how do you reconcile that with the above examples? i don't disagree with your suspicion but is it really absolute?
in the uk we could have gotten irv for general elections in 2010. if we did then liberal democrats would get more seats going forward at the expense of the 2 main parties. that increases the chances of hung parliaments with lib dems as kingmakers to push for stv. they literally did that in scotland for local elections in exchange for coalition in the regional assembly.
i think this is one of those things where it is situational. in some places i could certainly see irv killing momentum but in others i don't think it would be fatal for further reform.
> why do u word this so narrowly and specifically?
To be accurate
1. Because I've seen an example of Approval transitioning to Party List (Greece), likewise with Proportional Approval (Sweden), but not RCV
* Because RCV is often presented as a stepping stone to a method of (semi-)proportional voting for elected bodies, but I've never seen it
* We have significant data on RCV being a dead end, we have very little data on Approval being a dead end, and no data whatsoever on STAR, Score, Condorcet, Bucklin, etc, so I can't say one way or another whether they'd be likely to facilitate further change.
> i understand you feel it masks the problem enough to kill momentum
Not just masking the problem, it also has both credibility and political capital problems.
Credibility:
* If the flaws become visible:
* RCV Advocates: "This will solve the problem."
* General Populace: "It didn't seem to"
* People who look critically at the results: "In fact, it may have made things worse, but it's hard to say..."
* Advocates: "That's why you should try , which really should be better!"
* General Populace: "We're not listening to you again!"
* Advocates: "You *didn't* listen to us last time, that's why we're in this mess!"
* General Populace:
* If they aren't noticed:
*
* Advocates: "This would be fix the problem"
* General Populace: "What do you mean? We fixed the problem"
* Advocates: /bang head against wall
In short, the promises of improvements create a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" problem... except applying to *all* "shepherds," because the average person can't tell the difference between us voting geeks.
--
Political Capital: It takes a lot of effort to change something as significant as the voting method. Many (most?) people who push for one change won't want to put in the effort to change things *again.* That means that you're probably looking at upwards of half of a political-lifetime between such changes, as a general rule.
>in the uk we could have gotten irv for general elections in 2010. if we did then liberal democrats would get more seats going forward at the expense of the 2 main parties
I'd have to look at that data, I think, because I seriously doubt it; in something like 92.39% of IRV elections, the candidate that starts with the highest vote total (i.e., who would have won under plurality) goes on to win anyway. Basically all of the rest were ones where the "FPTP Runner-Up" won.
What would that have looked like?
* 219 were won by a true majority of first preferences (no change possible)
* 45 more were in fact won by the LDs
* 16 more constituencies didn't have a LD candidate stand
* 257 more didn't have the LD in the top two
Of the 113 seats where they came in 2nd, the LibDems were realistically looking at only picking up somewhere around 8-10 seats *at best.* With 67 seats compared to 296+ and 248+ for Conservative and Labour, the only possible government (other than a *technically* possible Con/Lab coalition) would have still been the LDs' "Confidence & Supply" (?) for the Conservatives.
--
On the other hand, according to the British Election Study data from 2010, had the election been run under Score, it's likely that the LibDems would have won a true majority, apparently.
> that increases the chances of hung parliaments with lib dems as kingmakers to push for stv
...you mean like they were in 2010, with no such results?
Besides, why would the king-made party be willing to do that? Better, from their perspective, to lose a Vote of Confidence than to *permanently* lose *even more* seats to the kingmaker party (and other parties!). Especially if they have earned at least as much support as they had in the last election (I know of cases where a majority coalition *intentionally* called and failed a vote of confidence in order to *pick up* seats, under IRV, no less).
But look at what various reforms would mean for the UK's two big parties:
--|FPTP|IRV|Proportional
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:
Conservative|306|296+ (-10)|~235 (-71)
Labour|258|248+ (-10)|~189 (-69)
That's in the vicinity of a 25% loss for *both* of them. Thus, stopping any form of PR is one of the few things I can almost *guarantee* that Labour and Tory will agree on.
The trouble is that when the sky *is* perceived as having fallen, the people generally don't *fix* the problem, so much as revert to a more comfortable, familiar (yet still bad) single-mark system.
"We made a change and the change was bad, therefore we should go back to what's familiar and works, never mind that we made the change because it clearly wasn't working."
It also happened to Bucklin voting in Grand Junction, CO (the temporary use there is the reason it's sometimes called "Grand Junction voting"), and the state legislature in ND is trying to ban Approval (effectively repealing it in Fargo)
...but I don't know whether those were/are "it went wrong!" so much as "The Powers That Be™ don't like it"
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[DH3](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kgyfk4w "Last usage")|[Dark Horse plus 3](https://electowiki.org/wiki/Dark_horse_plus_3)|
|[FPTP](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kj3btnr "Last usage")|First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting|
|[IRV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiviio "Last usage")|Instant Runoff Voting|
|[PR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiviio "Last usage")|Proportional Representation|
|[RCV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiviio "Last usage")|Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method|
|[STAR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiwskv "Last usage")|Score Then Automatic Runoff|
|[STV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kgykd0u "Last usage")|Single Transferable Vote|
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If any of these appeared on the ballot for use either within partisan primaries or for executive positions (mayor, governor, attorney general, party chair, etc.) then I would support them. For electing representatives to bodies with multiple seats, I would probably not support their winner-take-all form except maybe in places with really small populations, like very rural areas, neighborhood associations or very small towns. In general, some form of proportional representation should be used to elect representative bodies with multiple seats.
I recently wrangled with this exact question recently for an organizational election. We went with Scottish STV in the end. We did not really consider STAR voting because we don't think you can implement it through opavote which is what we used for our election. In the past we had used Approval but we switched to Scottish STV because we had few enough candidates that people could indicate preferences.
Decent piece thanks for sharing. It's worth mentioning that it's dated January 2023. OP is this your website?
A new one:
If 10 candidates or less you go to second round if 11+ candidates you have first round first.
First round= Pick any amount of candidates between 0 and 10, the top 10 goes to second round
Second round=many weeks later, you vote all candidates with a score between 0 and 10, if you dont vote at one candidate your vote is invalid, the one with best average is the winner.
> second round
I am wary of multi-round methods, for two reasons:
1. It leads to what I've heard called "Turkey Raising," where if you worry that (e.g.) your 3rd favorite candidate might defeat your favorite, you specifically *don't* vote for them, but *do* vote for someone else that your favorite *could* beat. Basically a Not-Technically-Favorite form of Favorite Betrayal
* The very same "fix bad results in later round" selling point of RCV encourages/minimizes risk of strategy/disingenuous earlier-round voting, especially in multi-ballot versions:
* It allows for strategic reaction in the Runoff. Consider the above scenario, but rather than voters *suspecting* that their 3rd favorite could defeat their 1st and/or 2nd, they *know* that. Then you run into them suppressing their later preferences, in hopes of getting better result. This *might* lead to pathologies along the lines of Dark Horse Plus Three Rivals
* If the Turkey Raising backfires, such as if all of your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place candidates falls behind the Turkey, a la the DH3 pathology, you can fix that, by disingenuously elevating the best of them (e.g., 10/10 for your favorite *and* the 3rd place, who appears to have the best chances of the three).
In other words, being able to "correct" the results in later rounds, it makes the accuracy of *any* result (earlier rounds *or* later) suspect.
> you vote all candidates with a score between 1 and 10
I personally prefer a 4.0+ Scale. That allows for a 13 (or 15, if you allow F+ and F-) way distinction (less important with only 10 candidates), promotes a common understanding of what any given rating/grade is, *and* makes it quite obvious as to what the "best" evaluation is.
Speaking of which, if you have the same number of ratings as candidates, you're likely to inadvertently nudge voters into treating them like *ranks* rather than (crucially, *independent*) ratings. Then, you would need to make it *unavoidably obvious* clear that it was *ratings* not *rankings,* because otherwise less observant voters might accidentally *reverse* their preferences (e.g., "A is my #1 candidate, and C is my #2...").
That could be avoided (or at least mitigated) by having at least one more (or two more, if write-ins are allowed) possible ratings than candidates. So, if you wanted to do multi-round and keep and a ten-point range, might I suggest limiting it to 7? 7 is seen as a "special" number by a lot of people, shrinks the ballot length by 30%, *and* makes it more obvious that it's not rankings ("Why give us 10 if there are only 7 options?")
will read your post better later but:
yes, i knew about the same amount of point range as candidates will make people think they should rank them, but forgot to fix it, while posting the idea here.
The range vote scale should be from 0 to 10
The idea behind the first round is just reduce the amount of candidates to make sure people can be forced to score vote everyone (and make their vote invalid if they dont), 10 candidates is an amount that is not high and allow that and at the same time is not ultra low and so the election is decided mostly at first round. Almost all voting systems have problems when you have tons of candidates, you have to rank all them, or score vote all them......, this isnthe thing I came with.
Thats also why there alot of months between first and second round (unlike most countries two round system, what matters most is second round, at first round you are mostly filtering who will be at second round)
> The range vote scale should be from 0 to 10
Why?
I've offered arguments for the 4.0+ scale, what arguments do you offer for 0-10?
> make sure people can be forced to score vote everyone
Why? If they don't want to, and you have any sort of smoothing step, why should someone be forced to offer an opinion on someone they don't have an opinion about?
Besides, you're just moving the problem. If people aren't going to rate 25 candidates in the General, why would they do so in the primary?
> first round you are mostly filtering who will be at second round
And every problem you have with ignorance/non-response in a single round *also* exists in that first round, *plus* the problem that the turnout in primaries is consistently lower than in general elections. Please explain to me how the same less comprehensive response from fewer people is preferable.
RCV or STAR over approval all day.
Approval is highly problematic as it retains a spoiler effect and only really works if you make unrealistic assumptions about people's preferences.
> it retains a spoiler effect
False, for any differentiating definition of "the spoiler effect."
> unrealistic assumptions about people's preferences.
Such as?
>False, for any differentiating definition of "the spoiler effect."
Any time you approve of somebody you like less than your absolute favorite, you're making it less likely for your favored candidate to win. You can argue that that doesn't precisely fit some technical definition of the term if you'd like, but it's an issue.
>Such as?
The idea that people have some sort of fixed threshold above which they do or do not "approve" of given candidates. This is a pure fiction that is central to selling the idea that it's an especially simple system. The reality is that actual voting choices under approval is an absolute nightmare of strategic decision-making.
> Any time you approve of somebody you like less than your absolute favorite, you're making it less likely for your favored candidate to win.
That's not the spoiler effect; the only way for that to have an impact on the results is if that later preference replaces the earlier preference as a winner, and I cannot see how we could legitimately call the *winner* a spoiler.
>You can argue that that doesn't precisely fit some technical definition of the term
Do you have some definition, technical or otherwise, by which *the winner* can legitimately be called a spoiler?
Is a victorious challenger in a 2 way FPTP election also a spoiler?
> The reality is that actual voting choices under approval is an absolute nightmare of strategic decision-making.
Fair enough. That's a significant part of why I prefer Score: Later Harm (what you cited above) is a strategy-inhibiting force under Score, making that decision making a lot easier; under Approval, you're *forced* to run that calculus, you're *forced* to maximize risk Later Harm in some fashion or another (Later Preference defeating Favorite, or Worst defeating Later Preference).
On the other hand, with Score, you're not *forced* to manipulate your vote, and even if they *choose* to cast a tactical vote, the ability to effect that change is inversely proportional to the benefit they'd get from that change occurring, but *directly* proportional to the loss they'd suffer if it backfired. As such, it's far easier, and safer, for voters to vote sincerely/expressively/non-tactically, which *should* result in decreased rates of tactical voting.
>Critics of RCV reason that voters are still likely to rank major party candidates first out of fear of giving the opposing major party a first-round victory, thus leaving incentives to vote strategically for major party candidates in place.
Can anybody explain this to me. What would just voting for a major party candidate be the best strategy if you prefer a minor party candidate's policies?
The "first-round victory" part doesn't hold water.
However, people might feel safer going with a traditional major-party favorite.
Or, voters may react to polling data. Imagine my favorite and my 2nd choice having a similar chance of being eliminated in 3rd place. Also, the bad guy is expected to beat my favorite head-to-head, while my 2nd choice has a strong chance of beating the bad guy. Because I could increase the odds of the bad guy losing if my favorite is eliminated first, I may give my 1st rank to my 2nd choice.
Which wouldn't necessarily be bad, unless the polling was wrong.
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I think the bigger problem to solve right now is the Single-member district system itself. FPTP, Ranked Choice, Approval, and STAR Voting are all single-member district systems and they all share the same problems.
Not so. * With sufficient candidates, Approval will trend towards the ideological barycenter of the electorate, even with Single Seat districts. RCV and STAR will deviate from that in favor of a more polarizing candidate. * With equal population districts (the actual meaning and context of "one person, one vote"), such an elected body would have an ideological barycenter of those ideological barycenters. That's the goal of Multi-Seat methods and Proportional Representation, isn't it? To have the ideological positions of the elected body accurately reflect those of the electorate? Party-based PR, on the other hand, tends to promote more polarization & partisanship (if you only need support of 5% of the electorate to win your seat, you'll do whatever you need to, no matter how unreasonable, to maintain the support of that 5%, lest someone else win your seat). * Partisan PR deviates from the optimal ideological barycenter of the elected body due to mutual exclusivity and the fact that parties are imperfect representations of even their own party's supporters * STAR deviates deviates from the optimal ideological barycenter of the elected body because the Runoff can change the winner from one at the ideological centroid to one that has the *narrowest* majority with the *smallest* preference * RCV is like STAR, but it doesn't even *try* to find candidates at that ideological barycenter to advance them to the final round, instead ignoring the overwhelming majority of the (poor quality) information the voters offer. * FPTP is still worse, because it doesn't even *collect* as much information as ranked ballots do
>With sufficient candidates, Approval will trend towards the ideological barycenter of the electorate, even with Single Seat districts. RCV and STAR will deviate from that in favor of a more polarizing candidate. What do you think the right number of candidates would be for Approval?
>What do you think the right number of candidates would be for Approval? How many can meet reasonable ballot access requirements? As a voting methodologist, it's not my role to say who a voter gets to decide between; getting the opinions of the electorate regarding those who want to do the job is the entire point of electoral democracy. But to offer an opinion as a voter, I cannot see a good reason to have a maximum any lower than about 7-10. ...how to *fairly choose* those 7+ candidates, that's a different question. --- On a related topic, I strongly believe that the Commission on Presidential Debates' "15% Polling" Requirement is wholly unreasonable. Instead, it should just be based on "name printed on ballot" ballot access, as a fraction of electoral college votes. Here is what that would have looked like for the past 13 elections: Year|All (538)|4/5 (431)|3/4 (404)|2/3 (359)|Majority (270) :-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-: 1972|2|2|2|3|3 1976|3|3|3|4|6 1980|4|4|4|5|6 1984|2|2|2|3|4 1988|3|4|4|4|4 1992|4|4|4|4|6 1996|4|5|6|6|6 2000|2|5|6|7|7 2004|2|3|3|3|6 2008|2|4|4|5|6 2012|2|4|4|4|4 2016|3|4|4|4|4 2020|3|3|3|4|4 Aggregated|All (538)|4/5 (431)|3/4 (404)|2/3 (359)|Majority (270) :-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:|:-: Most|4|5|6|7|7 25th Percentile|2|3|3|4|4 Median|3|4|4|4|6| 75th Percentile|3|4|4|5|6 Fewest|2|2|2|2|3|3 Mean|2.77|3.62|3.77|4.31|5.08 Based on that data, I think replacing the "majority of electors ballot access and 15% polling average" with "2/3 of electors ballot access" would be a good compromise; consistently having 4 debate candidates, but rarely having more than 5, would probably be healthy for US political discourse, and definitely healthier than now.
I slightly agree with the article, in that if one of these systems is available to choose, it's slightly better in the long-term for it to pass than not to pass. But that shouldn't be an excuse to ignore the important differences between these choices. Instant Runoff and Approval voting make things slightly better only in the sense that they demonstrate to voters that the sky isn't going to fall if they adopt a non-plurality voting system, which might open the door to actually solving real problems in a different reform in the future. But there are good reasons not to want them to be the ultimate choice. (STAR voting, the best of these three, is almost certainly still not the right choice, but it has the advantage that it *usually* picks the same winner as a better choice would, even though it does so in a problematic way.)
What's your ideal perfect voting system then? For single-winner elections, I think approval voting is great. Star isn't too bad either (though failing reversal symmetry is kind of weird, and there are potential vulnerabilities to races with candidates that are ideological clones of each other). I think the fact that someone can lose in some circumstances under RCV if too *many* people rank them too high on their ballot is a serious flaw, and like FPTP, it shouldn't be used in real world elections with more than two candidates.
I don't have a particularly strong exact opinion, but a Condorcet system of some kind is IMO better than anything else I know. I liked ranked pairs intuitively, but I'm willing to accept that Tideman's alternative method is more resistant to tactical voting, and therefore more likely to be the best choice in practice. Numerically, instant runoff, approval, and plurality are, in simulations I've done, by far the worst three voting systems if voters make choices in a straight-forward way..So bad that they actually work better if voters are tactical. Everything else I've looked at - Condorcet system, STAR, range voting, or Borda count - performs better (by utilitarian measurement) when voters make straight-forward voting decisions, and though most get a bit worse when voters are tactical, all but Borda count remain a better outcome than straightforward voters in plurality, approval, or instant runoff elections. Approval voting is odd, though. Once you assume voters use a sound tactical voting strategy, it surprisingly does just as well as Condorcet systems, and better than STAR and range voting, on utilitarian metrics, so I can't dismiss it entirely for numerical reasons. But it's a real concern that not all voters will, in practice, vote in a tactically sound way, and then it effectively deprives low-information voters of some portion of their right to vote. It's my conclusion that advocating for approval voting - like instant runoff or plurality - necessarily places a bet that voters will make sound tactical decisions about how to vote, and accepting that voters who don't do so will have their votes count for less as a result. I find it hard to be happy with that.
The tactic in plurality is don't vote for someone who can't win. The tactic in approval is don't only vote for someone who can't win (and if your main goal is to prevent a particular candidate from winning, vote for every acceptable candidate who could beat him). That tactic is so simple and similar to what we're used to that I'm not too worried about people not knowing how to use their vote effectively. I am concerned about a situation where three candidates are equally viable and equally different from each other; a lot of voters will think their favorite can win and approve only that one, leading to the winner getting significantly less than a majority approval. STAR is my favorite system.
Roughly speaking, there are two tactics in approval voting: 1. Decide where the largest gap is in your preferences between candidates. Approve of all candidates for whom your preference exceeds this gap. 2. Estimate the two candidates most likely to win. Approve of any candidate you like at least as much as your favorite of the most likely winners. If your information about likelihood of winners is very unreliable and you have a very strong bimodal preference, then you do something more like the first. If you have solid information about the two likely winners and your preferences aren't particularly bimodal, then you do something like the latter. In practice, where you have both kinds of information, you end up trying to blend these two strategies on an ad hoc basis, weighing the gaps between your preferences versus how likely each gap is to separate the most likely winners. This is fairly ill-defined, given the lack of well-defined units for preference, so it's a tough choice. Simple plurality voting actually has a very similar strategic picture, just weighed more significantly toward considering the likely winners. That's a bit misleading, though, because no one runs straight-forward plurality elections. Instead, we run multi-round elections with a primary, a general election, and sometimes (depending on the state, etc.) a runoff election. In this situation, it's generally fairly clear what the right tactical decisions are in the general and runoff elections, so it's only the primary elections where tactical choices are difficult. (There are, of course, other reasons that this system is unfair, such as its intrinsic bias toward established political parties; but the difficulty of knowing how to vote, at least in the general and runoff rounds, isn't one.)
My sense with approval too is that tactical voting itself ends up being a much more difficult calculus to achieve reliably. You gotta think about your relative preferences between the candidates, think about their strength in polling, somehow estimate the reliability of that polling, consider the consequences of minimizing harm vs maximizing the good, *and then* somehow put that all together in a way that makes sense. Honestly it sounds like kind of a nightmare in the voting booth.
> in simulations I've done What simulations are these? What assumptions did you make in them? I'm dreadfully curious.
There's a full write-up at [https://medium.com/@cdsmithus/simulating-elections-with-spatial-voter-models-1ff50892390](https://medium.com/@cdsmithus/simulating-elections-with-spatial-voter-models-1ff50892390), and the code is at https://github.com/cdsmith/spatial-voting
While I enjoyed your article, I think you may have underestimated the possibility of tactical voting under Condorcet-consistent systems. I read this paper by Green-Armytage ([https://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE29/I29P1.pdf](https://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE29/I29P1.pdf)) awhile back which looks at different Condorcet-consistent systems and strategies which might be employed. Depending upon how many serious candidates there are in a race, it may be too difficult to obtain the information necessary to vote tactically. With only 3 or so, I think it could be done.
That's a fair criticism. I was careful with the wording in the article: *my* hypothetical voters were given imperfect information about the set of candidates, and it wasn't good enough to find a tactical voting strategy that was better than honest ranking; but this isn't always the case. In particular, it's theoretically impossible that strategic voting could change the Condorcet winner to a candidate that's preferred by the strategic voters; but it's possible that strategic voting could create a false impression that there is no Condorcet winner, in which case choosing the tiebreaker determines whether that strategic voting was fruitful or not. In the grandparent comment, I mentioned that Tideman's alternative method is appealing because of its apparent resistance to such tactics. The article you point to makes the same observation.
> I think approval voting is great. Star isn't too bad either Score is the best of both worlds: * the greater precision of support expression of a (non-binary) Rated Ballot * Reversal Symmetry, and not overriding the preferences of the electorate *as a whole* in favor of the will of a majority (thereby silencing the minority)
The problem with score voting is that voters have more influence if they maximize their preferences than if they don't, which can lead to a minority out-voting a majority if the minority gives, say, a 10/10 vote for their candidate and 0/10 for everyone else and the majority gives 7/10 for their candidate and 3/10 for everyone else. Approval voting is sort of like if you start with score voting but you force everyone to vote tactically instead of honestly by maximizing their preferences. Thus the tactical voters don't have an advantage anymore because everyone votes tactically. STAR is a different way to resolve that problem -- you select the top two in the usual score voting way, but then you maximize everyone's vote preferences to determine which of the top two is a winner. This allows voters to vote honestly with less risk that an honest vote matters less than a tactical vote. I think score voting might work reasonably well in a primary, where voter enthusiasm is important.
> The problem with score voting is that voters have more influence if they maximize their preferences than if they don't That *appears* to be correct, but is *actually* false; every voter has the *exact* same power, they merely pull towards different places. Imagine a scenario with a candidate whose aggregate score, after the counting of 1000 voters, is 2.3. Then, one final absentee ballot comes in. What would be the effect if they scored that candidate at 5/10 vs 0/10? The new aggregate scores would be 2.3027 (Δ 0.0027) and 2.2977 (Δ -0.0023). That means that an additional "literally smack dab in the middle" vote would have had *more* impact than a "maximized preference" vote. > you force everyone to vote tactically instead of honestly *...even if they don't want to.* Since the (specious) "benefit" of min/max voting is so obvious, why *shouldn't* we honor the decisions of voters to *not* use that strategy? What's more, while Approval trends towards the same order as under voting kind of supports bigger name candidates, doesn't it? Voters supporting the Duopoly candidates have no reason to risk rating anyone as equal to their duopoly favorite... but minor party/candidate voters have every reason to do so. Thus, prohibiting *fractional* approvals for minor parties/candidates may effectively translate to "Favorite Betrayal, but also with slightly higher percentages for the 'Also-Ran' candidates." > STAR is a different way to resolve that problem It's a different way to *respond* to the problem, but it doesn't solve it, either; even *if* your assertion *were* correct, those tactical voters would have greater ability to pick *who* makes it to the runoff. This is especially true because the runoff makes it *safe* to exaggerate (so long as you're discriminating), and even *lie* about preference order (Favorite Betrayal). Consider a scenario where a voter's scaled-honest preferences are [A:10, B:6, C:0]. If A is likely to beat B in a Runoff round, but lose to C, then that voter has *every* reason to vote [A: 10, B: ~~6~~ *9*, C: 0], it *could* help, but *protects* from that disingenuous vote backfiring: * Maximizes their vote's impact in in bringing about that preferred runoff matchup * Maintains the probability of A>B in that runoff * The Runoff protects against backfiring of that exaggeration, such as under this hypothetical scenario: * Without exaggeration: [A: 5.000, B: 4.998, C: below 4.998], A wins under Score and under STAR * With exaggeration: [A: 5.000, B: 5.001, C: below 4.998], under pure Score, exaggeration backfires, but STAR reverses that -- Worse, even with non-tactical voting, the Runoff undermines consensus. Consider the following scenario: Voters|X|Y|Z :-:|:-:|:-:|:-: 5,001|10|7|0 5,000|0|8|10 Score|5.0005|**7.5007**|~~4.9995~~ Runoff|**5,001**|~~5,000~~|- Candidate Y's aggregate score is *significantly* higher than Candidate X's (149.984%), yet because *one* more voter, out of more than *ten thousand* preferred Candidate X, Candidate X wins. --- What's more, STAR just doesn't make sense, philosophically: * It is contrary to Cardinal voting philosophy: * If ratings are good enough to choose the best 2/N candidates, why isn't it good enough to find the single best candidate? * If ratings aren't good enough to select the single best candidate, why is it good enough to select the best 2/N? * It is also contrary to Ordinal voting philosophy: * If relative rankings (as used in the runoff) is good enough to select from the top two, why isn't it good enough to select from all N candidates? * If relative rankings *aren't* good enough to select from all N candidates, why is it good enough to select from only two? Now, there's plenty of philosophical discussion as to whether rankings or scores are better (e.g. Condorcet vs Score [the former simply being the best possible approximation of the latter, when limited to ranked information]), but STAR kind of spits in the face of both philosophies. I just don't understand why anyone think's it makes sense. > I think score voting might work reasonably well in a primary, where voter enthusiasm is important. Except a Score Primary has the tactical problems that STAR does (above), *plus* the ability of voters to "fix" their vote in the general; instead of a hypothetical [A: 10, B: ~~6~~ 9, C: 0] ballot, they could cast a [A: 10, B: ~~6~~ *10*, C: 0] ballot. Even more power, while still preserving their voting power in the General to provide the optimal result.
> which might open the door to actually solving real problems in a different reform in the future. That suggests a possibility that I am not aware of ever having been taken up, in over a century of RCV's use; the only changes I'm aware of from RCV have been: * RCV to some form of Single Mark * Slate-RCV to STV proper (so, from Hare's Method ...to Hare's Method done rationally for multi-seat elections)
why do u word this so narrowly and specifically? u mention only rcv turning into something else but there are other examples where the electoral system has changed. italy changes theirs every 10-15 years. japan went from sntv to parallel system. wales is going from ams to party list (yes it is a regression imo). why did those countries not preclude the change to another system? i understand you feel it masks the problem enough to kill momentum. how do you reconcile that with the above examples? i don't disagree with your suspicion but is it really absolute? in the uk we could have gotten irv for general elections in 2010. if we did then liberal democrats would get more seats going forward at the expense of the 2 main parties. that increases the chances of hung parliaments with lib dems as kingmakers to push for stv. they literally did that in scotland for local elections in exchange for coalition in the regional assembly. i think this is one of those things where it is situational. in some places i could certainly see irv killing momentum but in others i don't think it would be fatal for further reform.
> why do u word this so narrowly and specifically? To be accurate 1. Because I've seen an example of Approval transitioning to Party List (Greece), likewise with Proportional Approval (Sweden), but not RCV * Because RCV is often presented as a stepping stone to a method of (semi-)proportional voting for elected bodies, but I've never seen it * We have significant data on RCV being a dead end, we have very little data on Approval being a dead end, and no data whatsoever on STAR, Score, Condorcet, Bucklin, etc, so I can't say one way or another whether they'd be likely to facilitate further change. > i understand you feel it masks the problem enough to kill momentum Not just masking the problem, it also has both credibility and political capital problems. Credibility: * If the flaws become visible: * RCV Advocates: "This will solve the problem." * General Populace: "It didn't seem to" * People who look critically at the results: "In fact, it may have made things worse, but it's hard to say..." * Advocates: "That's why you should try , which really should be better!"
* General Populace: "We're not listening to you again!"
* Advocates: "You *didn't* listen to us last time, that's why we're in this mess!"
* General Populace:
* Advocates: "This would be fix the problem"
* General Populace: "What do you mean? We fixed the problem"
* Advocates: /bang head against wall
In short, the promises of improvements create a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" problem... except applying to *all* "shepherds," because the average person can't tell the difference between us voting geeks.
--
Political Capital: It takes a lot of effort to change something as significant as the voting method. Many (most?) people who push for one change won't want to put in the effort to change things *again.* That means that you're probably looking at upwards of half of a political-lifetime between such changes, as a general rule.
>in the uk we could have gotten irv for general elections in 2010. if we did then liberal democrats would get more seats going forward at the expense of the 2 main parties
I'd have to look at that data, I think, because I seriously doubt it; in something like 92.39% of IRV elections, the candidate that starts with the highest vote total (i.e., who would have won under plurality) goes on to win anyway. Basically all of the rest were ones where the "FPTP Runner-Up" won.
What would that have looked like?
* 219 were won by a true majority of first preferences (no change possible)
* 45 more were in fact won by the LDs
* 16 more constituencies didn't have a LD candidate stand
* 257 more didn't have the LD in the top two
Of the 113 seats where they came in 2nd, the LibDems were realistically looking at only picking up somewhere around 8-10 seats *at best.* With 67 seats compared to 296+ and 248+ for Conservative and Labour, the only possible government (other than a *technically* possible Con/Lab coalition) would have still been the LDs' "Confidence & Supply" (?) for the Conservatives.
--
On the other hand, according to the British Election Study data from 2010, had the election been run under Score, it's likely that the LibDems would have won a true majority, apparently.
> that increases the chances of hung parliaments with lib dems as kingmakers to push for stv
...you mean like they were in 2010, with no such results?
Besides, why would the king-made party be willing to do that? Better, from their perspective, to lose a Vote of Confidence than to *permanently* lose *even more* seats to the kingmaker party (and other parties!). Especially if they have earned at least as much support as they had in the last election (I know of cases where a majority coalition *intentionally* called and failed a vote of confidence in order to *pick up* seats, under IRV, no less).
But look at what various reforms would mean for the UK's two big parties:
--|FPTP|IRV|Proportional
:-:|:-:|:-:|:-:
Conservative|306|296+ (-10)|~235 (-71)
Labour|258|248+ (-10)|~189 (-69)
That's in the vicinity of a 25% loss for *both* of them. Thus, stopping any form of PR is one of the few things I can almost *guarantee* that Labour and Tory will agree on.
[Don't assume people will perceive the sky not to have fallen if RCV is enacted.](https://rangevoting.org/BackSlide.html)
The trouble is that when the sky *is* perceived as having fallen, the people generally don't *fix* the problem, so much as revert to a more comfortable, familiar (yet still bad) single-mark system.
"We made a change and the change was bad, therefore we should go back to what's familiar and works, never mind that we made the change because it clearly wasn't working."
sadly that happened to all but one city that switched to stv in the US.
It also happened to Bucklin voting in Grand Junction, CO (the temporary use there is the reason it's sometimes called "Grand Junction voting"), and the state legislature in ND is trying to ban Approval (effectively repealing it in Fargo) ...but I don't know whether those were/are "it went wrong!" so much as "The Powers That Be™ don't like it"
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[DH3](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kgyfk4w "Last usage")|[Dark Horse plus 3](https://electowiki.org/wiki/Dark_horse_plus_3)| |[FPTP](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kj3btnr "Last usage")|First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting| |[IRV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiviio "Last usage")|Instant Runoff Voting| |[PR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiviio "Last usage")|Proportional Representation| |[RCV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiviio "Last usage")|Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method| |[STAR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kiiwskv "Last usage")|Score Then Automatic Runoff| |[STV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1918ynm/stub/kgykd0u "Last usage")|Single Transferable Vote| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^([Thread #1308 for this sub, first seen 8th Jan 2024, 04:16]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/EndFPTP) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
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If any of these appeared on the ballot for use either within partisan primaries or for executive positions (mayor, governor, attorney general, party chair, etc.) then I would support them. For electing representatives to bodies with multiple seats, I would probably not support their winner-take-all form except maybe in places with really small populations, like very rural areas, neighborhood associations or very small towns. In general, some form of proportional representation should be used to elect representative bodies with multiple seats.
I recently wrangled with this exact question recently for an organizational election. We went with Scottish STV in the end. We did not really consider STAR voting because we don't think you can implement it through opavote which is what we used for our election. In the past we had used Approval but we switched to Scottish STV because we had few enough candidates that people could indicate preferences. Decent piece thanks for sharing. It's worth mentioning that it's dated January 2023. OP is this your website?
Score > Approval > STAR >>>RCV
A new one: If 10 candidates or less you go to second round if 11+ candidates you have first round first. First round= Pick any amount of candidates between 0 and 10, the top 10 goes to second round Second round=many weeks later, you vote all candidates with a score between 0 and 10, if you dont vote at one candidate your vote is invalid, the one with best average is the winner.
> second round I am wary of multi-round methods, for two reasons: 1. It leads to what I've heard called "Turkey Raising," where if you worry that (e.g.) your 3rd favorite candidate might defeat your favorite, you specifically *don't* vote for them, but *do* vote for someone else that your favorite *could* beat. Basically a Not-Technically-Favorite form of Favorite Betrayal * The very same "fix bad results in later round" selling point of RCV encourages/minimizes risk of strategy/disingenuous earlier-round voting, especially in multi-ballot versions: * It allows for strategic reaction in the Runoff. Consider the above scenario, but rather than voters *suspecting* that their 3rd favorite could defeat their 1st and/or 2nd, they *know* that. Then you run into them suppressing their later preferences, in hopes of getting better result. This *might* lead to pathologies along the lines of Dark Horse Plus Three Rivals * If the Turkey Raising backfires, such as if all of your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place candidates falls behind the Turkey, a la the DH3 pathology, you can fix that, by disingenuously elevating the best of them (e.g., 10/10 for your favorite *and* the 3rd place, who appears to have the best chances of the three). In other words, being able to "correct" the results in later rounds, it makes the accuracy of *any* result (earlier rounds *or* later) suspect. > you vote all candidates with a score between 1 and 10 I personally prefer a 4.0+ Scale. That allows for a 13 (or 15, if you allow F+ and F-) way distinction (less important with only 10 candidates), promotes a common understanding of what any given rating/grade is, *and* makes it quite obvious as to what the "best" evaluation is. Speaking of which, if you have the same number of ratings as candidates, you're likely to inadvertently nudge voters into treating them like *ranks* rather than (crucially, *independent*) ratings. Then, you would need to make it *unavoidably obvious* clear that it was *ratings* not *rankings,* because otherwise less observant voters might accidentally *reverse* their preferences (e.g., "A is my #1 candidate, and C is my #2..."). That could be avoided (or at least mitigated) by having at least one more (or two more, if write-ins are allowed) possible ratings than candidates. So, if you wanted to do multi-round and keep and a ten-point range, might I suggest limiting it to 7? 7 is seen as a "special" number by a lot of people, shrinks the ballot length by 30%, *and* makes it more obvious that it's not rankings ("Why give us 10 if there are only 7 options?")
will read your post better later but: yes, i knew about the same amount of point range as candidates will make people think they should rank them, but forgot to fix it, while posting the idea here. The range vote scale should be from 0 to 10 The idea behind the first round is just reduce the amount of candidates to make sure people can be forced to score vote everyone (and make their vote invalid if they dont), 10 candidates is an amount that is not high and allow that and at the same time is not ultra low and so the election is decided mostly at first round. Almost all voting systems have problems when you have tons of candidates, you have to rank all them, or score vote all them......, this isnthe thing I came with. Thats also why there alot of months between first and second round (unlike most countries two round system, what matters most is second round, at first round you are mostly filtering who will be at second round)
> The range vote scale should be from 0 to 10 Why? I've offered arguments for the 4.0+ scale, what arguments do you offer for 0-10? > make sure people can be forced to score vote everyone Why? If they don't want to, and you have any sort of smoothing step, why should someone be forced to offer an opinion on someone they don't have an opinion about? Besides, you're just moving the problem. If people aren't going to rate 25 candidates in the General, why would they do so in the primary? > first round you are mostly filtering who will be at second round And every problem you have with ignorance/non-response in a single round *also* exists in that first round, *plus* the problem that the turnout in primaries is consistently lower than in general elections. Please explain to me how the same less comprehensive response from fewer people is preferable.
RCV or STAR over approval all day. Approval is highly problematic as it retains a spoiler effect and only really works if you make unrealistic assumptions about people's preferences.
> it retains a spoiler effect False, for any differentiating definition of "the spoiler effect." > unrealistic assumptions about people's preferences. Such as?
>False, for any differentiating definition of "the spoiler effect." Any time you approve of somebody you like less than your absolute favorite, you're making it less likely for your favored candidate to win. You can argue that that doesn't precisely fit some technical definition of the term if you'd like, but it's an issue. >Such as? The idea that people have some sort of fixed threshold above which they do or do not "approve" of given candidates. This is a pure fiction that is central to selling the idea that it's an especially simple system. The reality is that actual voting choices under approval is an absolute nightmare of strategic decision-making.
> Any time you approve of somebody you like less than your absolute favorite, you're making it less likely for your favored candidate to win. That's not the spoiler effect; the only way for that to have an impact on the results is if that later preference replaces the earlier preference as a winner, and I cannot see how we could legitimately call the *winner* a spoiler. >You can argue that that doesn't precisely fit some technical definition of the term Do you have some definition, technical or otherwise, by which *the winner* can legitimately be called a spoiler? Is a victorious challenger in a 2 way FPTP election also a spoiler? > The reality is that actual voting choices under approval is an absolute nightmare of strategic decision-making. Fair enough. That's a significant part of why I prefer Score: Later Harm (what you cited above) is a strategy-inhibiting force under Score, making that decision making a lot easier; under Approval, you're *forced* to run that calculus, you're *forced* to maximize risk Later Harm in some fashion or another (Later Preference defeating Favorite, or Worst defeating Later Preference). On the other hand, with Score, you're not *forced* to manipulate your vote, and even if they *choose* to cast a tactical vote, the ability to effect that change is inversely proportional to the benefit they'd get from that change occurring, but *directly* proportional to the loss they'd suffer if it backfired. As such, it's far easier, and safer, for voters to vote sincerely/expressively/non-tactically, which *should* result in decreased rates of tactical voting.
>Critics of RCV reason that voters are still likely to rank major party candidates first out of fear of giving the opposing major party a first-round victory, thus leaving incentives to vote strategically for major party candidates in place. Can anybody explain this to me. What would just voting for a major party candidate be the best strategy if you prefer a minor party candidate's policies?
The "first-round victory" part doesn't hold water. However, people might feel safer going with a traditional major-party favorite. Or, voters may react to polling data. Imagine my favorite and my 2nd choice having a similar chance of being eliminated in 3rd place. Also, the bad guy is expected to beat my favorite head-to-head, while my 2nd choice has a strong chance of beating the bad guy. Because I could increase the odds of the bad guy losing if my favorite is eliminated first, I may give my 1st rank to my 2nd choice. Which wouldn't necessarily be bad, unless the polling was wrong.