| Assorted thoughts, with no particular relationship or broader point: > 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... |
This seems like the easier parallel to make, but also, I don't like the idea of relating presidential elections to something as inconsequential as product reviews...
>B is the condorcet winner, but I think it's clear that A is the best choice.
Ah, thanks, that makes sense. To rephrase it in my words: a condorcet election could elect someone that a minority HATES rather than a candidate that everyone is indifferent to. This makes a lot more sense why we would have these voting methods like RCV/STAR.
>There's research here that considers both honest and strategic voting: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
I'm definitely going to look into this when I find some free time. Thanks.
I've simply enjoyed attacking these voting methods via these small details, but I think it's really important as well. We are putting into place a system that will be put to extreme tests and will need a ton of integrity. Millions of people will be affected by it and will spend time coming up with strategies to maximize their votes (as they do currently by not voting for 3rd party candidates). Campaign strategists will try to use the system to their advantage (as they do currently by campaigning in battleground states). And malicious outsiders will try to use misinformation to attack the system as well. I want to make sure it's done right.
I think I was a little angry in my last comment where I said these conversations were tedious. I'm just really hesitant to choose a method like STAR, or even RCV as they're so different from our current system. I want a safe removal of the spoiler effect, which I think approval voting might do best, but I'm not sure, and it may be best for America if we make a big leap to a more complex system as this could help us avoid problems in the future, rather than having to transition again. Definitely going to look into this more though.