| >At the end of the day, any form of score voting would be a MASSIVE improvement over the status quo Yeah, I think we're both of one mind. I just find the math (or logic) behind these voting methods interesting. And it is somewhat important. >Yes, there are cases when STAR does not elect the condorcet winner. Of course, you could always add condorcet on top, and use STAR as the fallback. But you can do that for any system — basically all of which fail to elect the condorcet winner in some edge case — so it's not a particularly interesting insight I think the interesting part of my work in these threads is that the non-condorcet winner example for RCV is much easier to produce than the non-condorcet winner example for STAR. The RCV version only takes 3 candidates, while the STAR version takes ~25 candidates. While this could be a failure of our ability to find scenarios where the non-condorcet winner is elected, I believe it says more about how resistant these systems are to the spoiler effect, which, in essence, is where a non-condorcet winner is elected. I really like the idea of overlaying STAR and approval voting to show that STAR's expressiveness makes a big difference and I think your example is pretty realistic overall. But I have some issue with it as well. I made an assumption about voters in my example that you didn't make, which is that voters will try to impart their own will as much as possible. This means always using the 5 star vote in the STAR method. I thought this was a sane assumption to make about voters and that only using the 4 slot (never bubbling in 5 star) would be irrational. I think I could make a much less complicated example if I dropped this assumption. Also, I kinda feel uneasy about the cut off, but I'm not sure how to improve it. I just imagine that if a voter had any slight preference of one candidate over another, they would indicate that in the approval method. >Approval is leaving information about those preferences on the table (edit: as is condorcet!). How would a condorcet election leave out expressiveness? I think expressiveness is subjective and hard to define. I might've simplified analysis of these schemes by assuming that a condorcet winner system had the ultimate expressiveness (assuming there is a condorcet winner). >A condorcet winner doesn't exist, if there is a circular relationship: I meant a condorcet winner will be elected if it exists. I think the biggest problem with STAR voting is that these stars are kinda hard to reason with. What exactly does it mean if I give a candidate 4 or 5 stars? What affect will that have on the election? RCV might be more complicated, I'm not sure, but it's a lot easier to understand as it's easier to rank your favorite candidates. This really comes down to preference though and it's where I kinda checkout because it can lead to some really tedious arguments. They're all good. It would be great to see STAR in action in Eugene! |
> the STAR version takes ~25 candidates
I was just poking around on the star voting site, and "More than 5 candidates" was one of the criteria for whether there should be a primary or a single election.
> I just imagine that if a voter had any slight preference of one candidate over another, they would indicate that in the approval method.
Well, depending on the number of candidates, this isn't always possible — If there are 4 candidates who you love, like, dislike, and hate respectively, you don't have a way to express the difference between love/like and dislike/hate.
> I made an assumption about voters in my example that you didn't make, which is that voters will try to impart their own will as much as possible. This means always using the 5 star vote in the STAR method.
There's research here that considers both honest and strategic voting: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
I don't know if it considers that someone might always vote 5 stars for their favorite candidate, but thinking about that, I agree it is probably likely. It would not make much sense to cast an approval voting ballot and vote against, or for, all candidates. Might as well not vote, at that point :P
> How would a condorcet election leave out expressiveness?
N voters rank A=5, B=1, C=1.
N+1 voters rank A=4, B=5, C=1.
B is the condorcet winner, but I think it's clear that A is the best choice. This a failure mode of STAR voting as well, which elects B, while vanilla score voting (and approval voting) would elect A.
> What exactly does it mean if I give a candidate 4 or 5 stars?
I like to work up from FPTP (if I'm talking to someone who's not into this, I'd just call it "our current system" or "single choice"):
- In our current system, you vote for one person. Count the votes, and whoever has the most, wins.
- In Approval voting, you vote for as many people as you want — anyone you'd be okay with. Count the votes, and whoever has the most, wins.
- STAR voting works like Approval voting, but instead of a yes or no, you rank the candidates with 0-5 stars, like Yelp/Amazon reviews. Add up the stars, and whoever has the most, wins.
At this point, I make a choice about whether to mention the runoff, because it is hard to explain with words alone. If the person I'm talking to is interested, intellectual, or if I have access to a computer where I can show them this picture[1] on https://www.starvoting.us/star, then I'll go ahead and mention the runoff. Otherwise, it causes too much confusion.
[1]: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/unifiedprimary/pages/2...