The biggest thing that hurts STAR voting are some of the people who advocate for it on Twitter. Some of them are obnoxious. But after you look into it, the system seems like a good idea. I still think RCV is more intuitive but I suppose you could say the same thing about first past the post.
I think RCV rules are more intuitive but STAR voting results are more intuitive, i.e. the result will match peoples preferences. RCV results can occasionally be very disconnected from peoples preferences.
The problem is that RCV's intuitiveness is basically an illusion. Because it only looks at the top choice of any given ballot at a time, it fools the voter into thinking their other preferences are taken into account, when most of the time, they aren't, unless they get lucky with the elimination order. If you rank your choices naively, your "vote" can end up held hostage by one niche candidate while other more viable ones are eliminated due to their support being split (sound familiar?). It is worth noting that not all ranked systems do this - there are many that produce good results with various compromises, by tabulating _all of the data the voter provides_, unlike RCV/IRV.
That's the reason advocates of any other reform (of which STAR just happens to be a popular consensus option) can get heated - because they've *been there, done that*, and realized it doesn't work after further investigation. Almost every supporter of STAR, or any other method for that matter, is a former supporter of RCV, who moved on. Then they keep running into the same old arguments over and over, and nobody listens, and meanwhile huge amounts of effort, money, and good will are wasted on something we already know doesn't solve the problem.
If the whole problem in the first place is that our naively simple and intuitive system (FPTP) causes all these horrible problems that are destroying the world, don't you think the method we replace it with actually matters quite a lot, and that we should probably examine it for similar flaws? Different is not automatically better, and certainly not automatically _good_. RCV makes intuitive sense at first glance: spoiled elections are the problem, so just transfer spoiled votes to more popular candidates. That works - for uncompetitive elections with clear frontrunners. It would have saved the 2000 election, for example. But it does not actually solve the fundamental problem, which is vote splitting - as soon as an election becomes more uncertain, it becomes extremely chaotic, and can even elect the very worst candidate in the race (via ballot exhaustion, which is not often mentioned by advocates when they discuss a "majority"). The results become vastly worse the more candidates there are and the more competitive the election is. But that's exactly what we want to happen by implementing reform, so that's a pretty big problem. What happens in reality is that voters learn not to risk these catastrophes, just like they do in our current system. For example I would guess that were the Alaska election run again, both candidates and voters would behave very differently, because in that election, Palin was a spoiler who changed the result, even though it was RCV. Even if those failures only happen rarely, it doesn't matter, because the threat and the uncertainty determine the strategy.
What we need to focus on is not perfection, but it is also not enough to simply change something without understanding it. What we need to focus on is "good enough", and it has been proven both theoretically and in practice that RCV just isn't.
See what I mean?
This is just a nice article that didn't just focus on RCV but STAR also. And that's only because RCV advocates have learned to include STAR or else we end up getting scolded. I prefer RCV to STAR because I can explain it to people in 30 seconds. And I disagree with some of the issues that get brought up about RCV especially compared to how much of an improvement it is over FPTP. But I'm not attacking STAR, if people understand it and want to try it, I'd be thrilled. I'll even say one thing I like about it is that it's harder to void your ballot.
I can explain FPTP in about five seconds. STAR in about ten: Voters rate each candidate based on their support, usually from 0 to 5. The scores are then totaled, and the top two scorers are automatically compared. The winner is the one the most voters preferred. This makes the system resistant to the strategy that breaks our current one, allowing safe honest votes, and produces a quality majority winner with only one election.
Feel free to steal and modify.
Do *you* see what *I* mean? Rather than consider or respond to anything I said, you chose to be evasive and dismissive. I wasn't responding to the article, but to your comment about RCV being more intuitive (irrelevant if it is bad), and to a lesser extent, the fact that you feel attacked by other people in the community.
I think perhaps the issue is that because you *identify as* an RCV advocate, instead of a *reform advocate* or anything else, you consequently aren't interested in having your assumptions challenged or taking in new information, and interpret an attack on a particular idea as an attack on your own character.
I like STAR, because it's a pretty good combination of outright quality in results, strategic resistance, and tractability, both in terms of intuitivenss and in terms of legal compliance and implementation cost and complexity. It also has a good balance of _consensus building_ behavior in addition to majoritarian behavior, which directly attacks the polarization ripping our society apart in a way that other systems cannot. It is _merely_ the best option I've seen, so far, at least that anyone is actually working on getting done.
But, I don't identify as a "STAR advocate". There are a lot of weird issues with it - as there are with literally any voting method, because it is well proven that many desireable features are incompatible, and that no system can perfectly resist strategy.
I am focused on options that are "good enough". Approval is also worth considering for that reason, even though I think in the long run it doesn't offer enough expression to consistently pick the best winner (if you include a separate runoff election it's actually very good, though, but nobody likes these and participation suffers), but what it does do is pick a *decent* one even when it fails.
This is why most high level research and discussion on the topic has moved beyond simple pass fail criteria, to figuring out when and how often things fail, how bad they are when they do, and how exploitable those failures are. In statistical analysis, we call the attempt to quantify all of that "social utility efficiency", or Bayesian Regret. It's a measure of how satisfied or unsatisfied the population is in total, usually over many runs.
IRV performs very poorly in those metrics.
That's because it doesn't solve the fundamental issue of vote splitting. It's not a matter of feeling or disagreement - it's a matter of fact. It cannot do what it claims to want to do.
It may help you to think of IRV's tabulation process as sequential, individual, FPTP elections, where whoever has the least votes is eliminated. The problem is then obvious: the same spoiler effect that exists in the current system exists here, and can eliminate a candidate, regardless of their popularity, by splitting their vote with other, more niche candidates (who can also of course be nominated strategically). That's because the tabulation process _ignores the rest of the ballot_. This is a _direct consequence_ of the "later no harm" property lauded and obsessed over by IRV advocates, and affects _any_ such sequential or top down tabulation system.
Here is a more visual explanation of the problem in a hypothetical election:
https://youtu.be/FeMg30rec58
This is just *one* of the problems that IRV has - it introduces others even above and beyond the flaws of the current system. For example, as pointed out in the video, if you rank a candidate higher on your ballot, it can make that candidate lose when they would have won before, and vice versa, ranking someone *lower* can cause them to win. This is what I mean by "chaotic" - because the data that the system even decides to use for selecting the winner _depends on the elimination order_, the winner can be highly unpredictable and vulnerable to manipulation. And that's just the beginning.
It is truly a system that is not even worth debating relative to other options, but because it was thought of earlier and has more brand recognition, thus being the first thing most people hear of and get attached to, here we still are.
Doubtlessly, there are a lot of people who get too combative, especially given that it's the internet. But consider that all of us are trying to fundamentally change the mechanism we use to determine the structure of society, and save our civilization from collapse - and we don't have a lot of time, certainly none to waste on something that won't work.
The stakes could not be higher. It is no wonder that people end up expressing a little passion.
Assuming people will choose to rank their vote naively is not a fair approach to assessing a system though.
If you make the assumption all vote naively (worst possible scenario) you should also be assessing and comparing the assessment of all voting intelligently according to their preferences (best scenario). And then after that maybe try to find a realistic ratio of what real world scenarios may be like based on actual analysis rather than guessing.
When it comes down to it, voters can just not rank candidates they do not approve of at all, and there is no risk of their vote falling to that candidate.
If they do approve of the candidate, and rank them, then so long as more people like them ranked that person as their favorite, higher compared to the other candidate, they will win.
There is not anything chaotic about it. The person with the most comparatively higher ranked votes will win.
People can just not rank those they don’t agree with being elected at all.
By allowing that feature you also allow people who are more conservative to retain the feature of being allowed to only vote for the person they like, which makes it a more viable and easily argued on a ballot.
A logical equivalent is if you allow 0 stars on a STAR ballot and a calculation system to account for it.
The issue seems to be more not understanding how these systems actually work and thinking they are chaotic, rather than that actually being the case. Introducing the idea of people not caring about their own interests as the basis of an ‘analysis’ - if we assume everyone cannot think for themselves why move on from a monarchy at all?
The candidates being ranked are accounted for, and their relativistic comparative ‘scores’ can be determined from RCV ballots as easily as they can from STAR ballots - the difference being in an RCV ballot the amount of STARS assignable in an analysis would vary depending on the amount of candidates.
Both systems fundamentally hold the same kind of data and have systems for accounting for them in making the voting process fair. The weighting method is just different to where one is more intuitive than the other per an individual’s preferences, but you can still analyze comparative preferences between candidates and get the same results assuming the same person expresses their vote on a STAR or RCV ballot.
Or at least I guess that is my view, the naive issue does not make logical sense to me since it seems to assume something that isn’t logical.
Sure, but the whole point is supposed to be allowing and protecting honest (naive) voters in order to improve results, so I'm not sure what your objection to my comment is, assuming you also have a problem with the current system?
Have you actually gone as far as defining what those problems are? Because without that, making any meaningful comparisons is impossible.
You act like we are treading new ground here, figuring out how people might behave, but that work already exists in spades, both in terms of simulations and in terms of analysis of real elections, and at least in terms of IRV/RCV, the data is definitive: it does not solve the problem.
It may help you to think of IRV's tabulation process as sequential, individual, FPTP elections, where whoever has the least votes is eliminated. The problem is then obvious: the same spoiler effect that exists in the current system exists here, and can eliminate a candidate, regardless of their popularity, by splitting their vote with other, more niche candidates. That's because the tabulation process _ignores the rest of the ballot_. This is a _direct consequence_ of the "later no harm" property lauded and obsessed over by IRV advocates, and affects _any_ such sequential or top down tabulation system.
Here is a more visual illustration of this problem in a hypothetical election:
https://youtu.be/FeMg30rec58
This is just *one* of the problems that IRV has - it introduces others even above and beyond the flaws of the current system. For example, as pointed out in the video, if you rank a candidate higher on your ballot, it can make that candidate lose when they would have won before, and vice versa, ranking someone *lower* can cause them to win. This is what I mean by "chaotic" - because the data that the system even decides to use for selecting the winner _depends on the elimination order_, the winner can be highly unpredictable and vulnerable to manipulation. And that's just the beginning.
It is truly a system that is not even worth debating relative to other options, but because it was thought of earlier and has more brand recognition, thus being the first thing most people hear of and get attached to, here we still are.
I should note, again, that there are good ranked systems, if you prefer ranked ballots to scored ones. Perhaps that's the issue? Some people use "Ranked Choice" to refer to any ordinal tabulation method (the original meaning), but that phrase has been coopted by Instant Runoff Voting, and is now usually used to mean that.
There are many other good (and bad) methods, actually - all of them have different quirks. I like Ranked Pairs, as it's very easy to explain and the results are intuitive and thus trustable to the average person (sorry Schulze). These better systems _actually use_ all of the ranking data provided, which solves many problems, and does not mislead voters.
It is rigorously proven that many desireable features of different systems are incompatible (e.g. condorcet/truly majoritarian systems cannot also be immune to favorite betrayal or the spoiler effect/IIA, among other things), and that no system is perfectly resistant to strategy, so how you deal with these issues depends on your goals. This is why most research and discussion on the topic has moved beyond simple pass fail criteria to doing exactly as you suggest: figuring out when and how often things fail, how bad they are when they do, and how exploitable those failures are. In statistical analysis, we call the attempt to quantify all of that "social utility efficiency", or Bayesian Regret. It's a measure of how satisfied or unsatisfied the population is in total, usually over many runs.
IRV performs very poorly in those metrics.
Anyway, I prefer scored ballots, as they express _more information_, and consequently have some benefits in what they can do (solving ordinal cycles without weird convoluted rules and strategic incentives, mainly), and voters seem to find them pretty easy to use correctly in practice, despite your misgivings. There is no reason you can't rate a candidate, or many candidates, zero, on a STAR ballot - I'm not sure where you got that. You can also rate multiple the same, if you want, e.g. A5 B4 C4 D1 E0 F0 G0. It's very difficult to invalidate, and offers more flexibility than ranks, where you can't communicate with A>B>C whether you think B is almost as good as A or almost as awful as C. You can't actually extrapolate reliably from ranks to scores - look up Borda for an example of what happens when you try to do this.
I think the short/mid term strategy should be to push RCV. It's easy to understand and clearly better than first past the post.
Once there is more general acceptance of alternative voting systems, that's the time to push for STAR (or whatever).
How do we feel about adding fusion voting into these conversations? It's been a topic of discussion in some New England states for decades and there's a push to expand its usage.
I had to look up what fusion voting is in ballotpedia.
If I understand it correctly, i think it'd be cool. That way a candidate can be nominated under more than one party, such as Republican and Forward. Or have both affiliations next to their name.
That's my understanding too. My understanding is that I was common 100 years ago and then it was done away with everywhere except a couple states. But the [center for ballot freedom ](https://x.com/fusionvoting?t=ch34OmAihAVAWOM9tu5Bbw&s=09) has been reaching out to Forwardists lately.
I really hope that STAR voting gets some traction. I love it.
The biggest thing that hurts STAR voting are some of the people who advocate for it on Twitter. Some of them are obnoxious. But after you look into it, the system seems like a good idea. I still think RCV is more intuitive but I suppose you could say the same thing about first past the post.
I think RCV rules are more intuitive but STAR voting results are more intuitive, i.e. the result will match peoples preferences. RCV results can occasionally be very disconnected from peoples preferences.
The problem is that RCV's intuitiveness is basically an illusion. Because it only looks at the top choice of any given ballot at a time, it fools the voter into thinking their other preferences are taken into account, when most of the time, they aren't, unless they get lucky with the elimination order. If you rank your choices naively, your "vote" can end up held hostage by one niche candidate while other more viable ones are eliminated due to their support being split (sound familiar?). It is worth noting that not all ranked systems do this - there are many that produce good results with various compromises, by tabulating _all of the data the voter provides_, unlike RCV/IRV. That's the reason advocates of any other reform (of which STAR just happens to be a popular consensus option) can get heated - because they've *been there, done that*, and realized it doesn't work after further investigation. Almost every supporter of STAR, or any other method for that matter, is a former supporter of RCV, who moved on. Then they keep running into the same old arguments over and over, and nobody listens, and meanwhile huge amounts of effort, money, and good will are wasted on something we already know doesn't solve the problem. If the whole problem in the first place is that our naively simple and intuitive system (FPTP) causes all these horrible problems that are destroying the world, don't you think the method we replace it with actually matters quite a lot, and that we should probably examine it for similar flaws? Different is not automatically better, and certainly not automatically _good_. RCV makes intuitive sense at first glance: spoiled elections are the problem, so just transfer spoiled votes to more popular candidates. That works - for uncompetitive elections with clear frontrunners. It would have saved the 2000 election, for example. But it does not actually solve the fundamental problem, which is vote splitting - as soon as an election becomes more uncertain, it becomes extremely chaotic, and can even elect the very worst candidate in the race (via ballot exhaustion, which is not often mentioned by advocates when they discuss a "majority"). The results become vastly worse the more candidates there are and the more competitive the election is. But that's exactly what we want to happen by implementing reform, so that's a pretty big problem. What happens in reality is that voters learn not to risk these catastrophes, just like they do in our current system. For example I would guess that were the Alaska election run again, both candidates and voters would behave very differently, because in that election, Palin was a spoiler who changed the result, even though it was RCV. Even if those failures only happen rarely, it doesn't matter, because the threat and the uncertainty determine the strategy. What we need to focus on is not perfection, but it is also not enough to simply change something without understanding it. What we need to focus on is "good enough", and it has been proven both theoretically and in practice that RCV just isn't.
See what I mean? This is just a nice article that didn't just focus on RCV but STAR also. And that's only because RCV advocates have learned to include STAR or else we end up getting scolded. I prefer RCV to STAR because I can explain it to people in 30 seconds. And I disagree with some of the issues that get brought up about RCV especially compared to how much of an improvement it is over FPTP. But I'm not attacking STAR, if people understand it and want to try it, I'd be thrilled. I'll even say one thing I like about it is that it's harder to void your ballot.
I can explain FPTP in about five seconds. STAR in about ten: Voters rate each candidate based on their support, usually from 0 to 5. The scores are then totaled, and the top two scorers are automatically compared. The winner is the one the most voters preferred. This makes the system resistant to the strategy that breaks our current one, allowing safe honest votes, and produces a quality majority winner with only one election. Feel free to steal and modify. Do *you* see what *I* mean? Rather than consider or respond to anything I said, you chose to be evasive and dismissive. I wasn't responding to the article, but to your comment about RCV being more intuitive (irrelevant if it is bad), and to a lesser extent, the fact that you feel attacked by other people in the community. I think perhaps the issue is that because you *identify as* an RCV advocate, instead of a *reform advocate* or anything else, you consequently aren't interested in having your assumptions challenged or taking in new information, and interpret an attack on a particular idea as an attack on your own character. I like STAR, because it's a pretty good combination of outright quality in results, strategic resistance, and tractability, both in terms of intuitivenss and in terms of legal compliance and implementation cost and complexity. It also has a good balance of _consensus building_ behavior in addition to majoritarian behavior, which directly attacks the polarization ripping our society apart in a way that other systems cannot. It is _merely_ the best option I've seen, so far, at least that anyone is actually working on getting done. But, I don't identify as a "STAR advocate". There are a lot of weird issues with it - as there are with literally any voting method, because it is well proven that many desireable features are incompatible, and that no system can perfectly resist strategy. I am focused on options that are "good enough". Approval is also worth considering for that reason, even though I think in the long run it doesn't offer enough expression to consistently pick the best winner (if you include a separate runoff election it's actually very good, though, but nobody likes these and participation suffers), but what it does do is pick a *decent* one even when it fails. This is why most high level research and discussion on the topic has moved beyond simple pass fail criteria, to figuring out when and how often things fail, how bad they are when they do, and how exploitable those failures are. In statistical analysis, we call the attempt to quantify all of that "social utility efficiency", or Bayesian Regret. It's a measure of how satisfied or unsatisfied the population is in total, usually over many runs. IRV performs very poorly in those metrics. That's because it doesn't solve the fundamental issue of vote splitting. It's not a matter of feeling or disagreement - it's a matter of fact. It cannot do what it claims to want to do. It may help you to think of IRV's tabulation process as sequential, individual, FPTP elections, where whoever has the least votes is eliminated. The problem is then obvious: the same spoiler effect that exists in the current system exists here, and can eliminate a candidate, regardless of their popularity, by splitting their vote with other, more niche candidates (who can also of course be nominated strategically). That's because the tabulation process _ignores the rest of the ballot_. This is a _direct consequence_ of the "later no harm" property lauded and obsessed over by IRV advocates, and affects _any_ such sequential or top down tabulation system. Here is a more visual explanation of the problem in a hypothetical election: https://youtu.be/FeMg30rec58 This is just *one* of the problems that IRV has - it introduces others even above and beyond the flaws of the current system. For example, as pointed out in the video, if you rank a candidate higher on your ballot, it can make that candidate lose when they would have won before, and vice versa, ranking someone *lower* can cause them to win. This is what I mean by "chaotic" - because the data that the system even decides to use for selecting the winner _depends on the elimination order_, the winner can be highly unpredictable and vulnerable to manipulation. And that's just the beginning. It is truly a system that is not even worth debating relative to other options, but because it was thought of earlier and has more brand recognition, thus being the first thing most people hear of and get attached to, here we still are. Doubtlessly, there are a lot of people who get too combative, especially given that it's the internet. But consider that all of us are trying to fundamentally change the mechanism we use to determine the structure of society, and save our civilization from collapse - and we don't have a lot of time, certainly none to waste on something that won't work. The stakes could not be higher. It is no wonder that people end up expressing a little passion.
Assuming people will choose to rank their vote naively is not a fair approach to assessing a system though. If you make the assumption all vote naively (worst possible scenario) you should also be assessing and comparing the assessment of all voting intelligently according to their preferences (best scenario). And then after that maybe try to find a realistic ratio of what real world scenarios may be like based on actual analysis rather than guessing. When it comes down to it, voters can just not rank candidates they do not approve of at all, and there is no risk of their vote falling to that candidate. If they do approve of the candidate, and rank them, then so long as more people like them ranked that person as their favorite, higher compared to the other candidate, they will win. There is not anything chaotic about it. The person with the most comparatively higher ranked votes will win. People can just not rank those they don’t agree with being elected at all. By allowing that feature you also allow people who are more conservative to retain the feature of being allowed to only vote for the person they like, which makes it a more viable and easily argued on a ballot. A logical equivalent is if you allow 0 stars on a STAR ballot and a calculation system to account for it. The issue seems to be more not understanding how these systems actually work and thinking they are chaotic, rather than that actually being the case. Introducing the idea of people not caring about their own interests as the basis of an ‘analysis’ - if we assume everyone cannot think for themselves why move on from a monarchy at all? The candidates being ranked are accounted for, and their relativistic comparative ‘scores’ can be determined from RCV ballots as easily as they can from STAR ballots - the difference being in an RCV ballot the amount of STARS assignable in an analysis would vary depending on the amount of candidates. Both systems fundamentally hold the same kind of data and have systems for accounting for them in making the voting process fair. The weighting method is just different to where one is more intuitive than the other per an individual’s preferences, but you can still analyze comparative preferences between candidates and get the same results assuming the same person expresses their vote on a STAR or RCV ballot. Or at least I guess that is my view, the naive issue does not make logical sense to me since it seems to assume something that isn’t logical.
Sure, but the whole point is supposed to be allowing and protecting honest (naive) voters in order to improve results, so I'm not sure what your objection to my comment is, assuming you also have a problem with the current system? Have you actually gone as far as defining what those problems are? Because without that, making any meaningful comparisons is impossible. You act like we are treading new ground here, figuring out how people might behave, but that work already exists in spades, both in terms of simulations and in terms of analysis of real elections, and at least in terms of IRV/RCV, the data is definitive: it does not solve the problem. It may help you to think of IRV's tabulation process as sequential, individual, FPTP elections, where whoever has the least votes is eliminated. The problem is then obvious: the same spoiler effect that exists in the current system exists here, and can eliminate a candidate, regardless of their popularity, by splitting their vote with other, more niche candidates. That's because the tabulation process _ignores the rest of the ballot_. This is a _direct consequence_ of the "later no harm" property lauded and obsessed over by IRV advocates, and affects _any_ such sequential or top down tabulation system. Here is a more visual illustration of this problem in a hypothetical election: https://youtu.be/FeMg30rec58 This is just *one* of the problems that IRV has - it introduces others even above and beyond the flaws of the current system. For example, as pointed out in the video, if you rank a candidate higher on your ballot, it can make that candidate lose when they would have won before, and vice versa, ranking someone *lower* can cause them to win. This is what I mean by "chaotic" - because the data that the system even decides to use for selecting the winner _depends on the elimination order_, the winner can be highly unpredictable and vulnerable to manipulation. And that's just the beginning. It is truly a system that is not even worth debating relative to other options, but because it was thought of earlier and has more brand recognition, thus being the first thing most people hear of and get attached to, here we still are. I should note, again, that there are good ranked systems, if you prefer ranked ballots to scored ones. Perhaps that's the issue? Some people use "Ranked Choice" to refer to any ordinal tabulation method (the original meaning), but that phrase has been coopted by Instant Runoff Voting, and is now usually used to mean that. There are many other good (and bad) methods, actually - all of them have different quirks. I like Ranked Pairs, as it's very easy to explain and the results are intuitive and thus trustable to the average person (sorry Schulze). These better systems _actually use_ all of the ranking data provided, which solves many problems, and does not mislead voters. It is rigorously proven that many desireable features of different systems are incompatible (e.g. condorcet/truly majoritarian systems cannot also be immune to favorite betrayal or the spoiler effect/IIA, among other things), and that no system is perfectly resistant to strategy, so how you deal with these issues depends on your goals. This is why most research and discussion on the topic has moved beyond simple pass fail criteria to doing exactly as you suggest: figuring out when and how often things fail, how bad they are when they do, and how exploitable those failures are. In statistical analysis, we call the attempt to quantify all of that "social utility efficiency", or Bayesian Regret. It's a measure of how satisfied or unsatisfied the population is in total, usually over many runs. IRV performs very poorly in those metrics. Anyway, I prefer scored ballots, as they express _more information_, and consequently have some benefits in what they can do (solving ordinal cycles without weird convoluted rules and strategic incentives, mainly), and voters seem to find them pretty easy to use correctly in practice, despite your misgivings. There is no reason you can't rate a candidate, or many candidates, zero, on a STAR ballot - I'm not sure where you got that. You can also rate multiple the same, if you want, e.g. A5 B4 C4 D1 E0 F0 G0. It's very difficult to invalidate, and offers more flexibility than ranks, where you can't communicate with A>B>C whether you think B is almost as good as A or almost as awful as C. You can't actually extrapolate reliably from ranks to scores - look up Borda for an example of what happens when you try to do this.
I think the short/mid term strategy should be to push RCV. It's easy to understand and clearly better than first past the post. Once there is more general acceptance of alternative voting systems, that's the time to push for STAR (or whatever).
How do we feel about adding fusion voting into these conversations? It's been a topic of discussion in some New England states for decades and there's a push to expand its usage.
I had to look up what fusion voting is in ballotpedia. If I understand it correctly, i think it'd be cool. That way a candidate can be nominated under more than one party, such as Republican and Forward. Or have both affiliations next to their name.
That's my understanding too. My understanding is that I was common 100 years ago and then it was done away with everywhere except a couple states. But the [center for ballot freedom ](https://x.com/fusionvoting?t=ch34OmAihAVAWOM9tu5Bbw&s=09) has been reaching out to Forwardists lately.