51–60 of 128 posts
Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact.
For examples:
- Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.)
- The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice.
- Eliminating primaries will reduce polarization and voter fatigue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations…
Excellent critique of ratings based system. I think this is the biggest problem with multi-point (more than 3 values for score) STAR voting. What constitutes "5 star"? What about 0/blank vs 1 star? Framing is important, and I think STAR would be most optimal with good ol' Likert scale (five or seven point) rather than 0-N stars. But I think even simpler is the "3-point Likert" behavior of V321: approve, disapprove, a…
Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?
You kind of have to keep the whole voting system model in your head to decide.
You might not think it's very difficult but even ranking candidates is too complicated for most people. Anything more complicated than that has no chance in the real world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the ex…
> Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless. Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it red…
With strength of preferences, some people will give their scores as 2,3,4 (out of 5) because nobody is perfect and nobody is truly the worst imaginable. But other people will give out scores 1,3,5 if they feel that has more effect, or because the are comfortable using score extremes everywhere else in life - with no real difference in the strength of conviction between those two groups of people.
And some people will use only 1,5 because they think giving every candidate except the one you hate a 5 increases the chance of the one you hate not getting in, even if they don't really like any of the others, or like one more than the others. It doesn't mean they are "pro" any of the candidates.
And some will give their favoured candidate 5 and everyone else 1 or 2.
I was afraid some math would support a counterintuitive method, but I was glad to learn about 321 Voting for the first time as well as to see that it scored the best. Pretty neat!
When you say 'math', what does that mean to you?
To me, especially in this case, 'math' as used here (a model) is ultimately a formalization of a decision criteria. The decision criteria used here, VSE, is a value judgment. Assuming the math is correct and the simulation bug free, I'm most interested in assessing the norms (human values and priorities) implicit in the mathematical scoring function.
Though mathematical logic is indeed deductive, using it to assess social systems is subjective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of chang…
OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5…
(Putting candidates in the "leave off" set is the same as ranking them below a "none of the below" pseudo-candidate because it means they won't inherit unused vote shares during counting).
That solves your distinguish and C-dislike objections, and feels more honest when voting.
It also lets you feel fair when there are two candidates you both like equally and don't want to add to signal-favouritism when the results come out.
At a local club (where people are friendly so it's not meant to be competitive like in government), having to rank multiple loved and personally known candidates for a committee occupied by multiple people, when you like several equally, doesn't change the outcome at all, assuming they win, but it tends to greatly amplify the tiny, irrelevant biases fron the most petty things people have to draw on into very large differences in reported scores. This makes it looks like one person is very much preferred to be in charge of the rest of the committee or team, much more than is actually true, ie. it doesn't actually represent the voters intentions. The election outcome is representative, but the outsized score differences are interpreted wrongly. So this seeds ungrounded internal divisions after the vote, peculiar strategic voting at subsequent elections, and peculiar behaviours to chase after those "tiny, irrelevant biases". This isn't good for anyone involved. So it's good to allow voters to rank candidates equally for this reason too, if the voter genuinely feels that way.
The thing that surprises me from those graphs is that 100% strategic voting often led to a better result than 100% honest voting.
If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility.
Let's take the simplest, common scenario of two clear frontrunners. In score voting's one-sided strategic scenarios: - Honest voters who support candidate A will put down magical normally-distributed numbers. Their scores for A end up perhaps 10-50% higher than their scores for B. - Strategic voters who support candidate B will maximize B's chance of winning by putting down the highest score for B and the lowest score for A. Score for B will be uniformly 100% higher than scores for B.
In this scenario it takes perhaps 2-10 honest A voters for every strategic B voter for A to win. Yet somehow, the VSE for 1-sided strategic score scenarios are all much better than plurality, and equal with approval?
This is a commonly-discussed downside for any score voting system, where it gives strategic voters extra power, and, in these 1-sided scenarios, is worse than plurality. The downside is appearing nowhere in this data.
Geeking out about voting systems is great. Big fan. Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact. For examples: - Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.) - The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice. -…
These results aren't passing the sniff-test for me. If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Let's take the simplest, common scenario of two clear frontrunners. In score voting's one-sided stra…
Yes, this is how the terms are generally used in voting systems literature.