I’m quite interested in voting systems, but I was surprised to discover that the general consensus is that score beats approval! I checked it out and it seems to be a robust finding that in real life people understand & are happier with score, but this surprised me.
I’d think that since there are so many options for score, it’d be a bit overwhelming and hard to figure out how to optimize. Whereas with approval it’s basically “vote for the minor candidates you like better than the major ones; and also vote for your least unfavorite major candidate.” Which is simple enough.
I can more clearly see the argument for three to five scoring options instead of approval. If you’re, say, a Warren supporter in the 2020 election (which of course is now a free-for-all approval voting bonanza) do you vote for Biden or not? If you don’t vote for him, you risk throwing the election to Trump; whereas if you do, you may end up giving the election to Biden over Warren. So a middle-ground-y thing seems reasonable here. (A counterargument here is that with polling, it can be more clearly seen whether a mass effort by the Democratic Party Establishment to get liberals in line is necessary, or whether people can coalesce behind Warren or Sanders or whoever.)
Three options nicely correlates with “like, neutral, dislike” and five nicely with “love, like, neutral, dislike, hate” as heuristics for honest voting. I’m just apprehensive about a hundred. I don’t even know how I’d vote with more than three candidates to rate on such a high scale, I shudder to think how a low-information voter would do it.
The trouble with Score is that optimal voter strategy there is to min-max your ratings—score(max) everyone you’d accept and score(min) everyone else—which would make it functionally equivalent to Approval if everyone did so; however, since not everyone will, voters who use the full score range are just voluntarily, albeit unwittingly, diluting their ballot power to determine the actual winner vs. voters who use min-max strategy.
E.g., suppose your favorite is a minor-party longshot, and your second choice is a major-party frontrunner; you might naively rate your favorite 5⁄5 and your second 4⁄5, but that doesn’t much help your favorite actually win since they’re a longshot, and it nerfs the support you give to your second who stands a fair shot at winning, so why pull that proverbial punch? It’s more effective, and more likely to maximize your chances of a satisfactory outcome, to just rate them both 5⁄5. Moreover, suppose you rate your worst-evil candidate 0⁄5 and your lesser-evil 1⁄5; sure, at least lesser-evil isn’t That Guy, but you really don’t want either to win, so why give them any support at all that might help them edge out someone you like better? It’s more effective to just rate them both 0⁄5.
STAR addresses that problem by giving voters a compelling reason to use the full score range, as the summed/average scores don’t determine the final winner, only the top-two runoff finalists, and then the finalist rated higher on more ballots wins, thereby making relative scoring relevant. Attempting insincere strategy here is about as likely to backfire as succeed, so voters might as well just rate each candidate sincerely using the full score range available.
I’m quite interested in voting systems, but I was surprised to discover that the general consensus is that score beats approval! I checked it out and it seems to be a robust finding that in real life people understand & are happier with score, but this surprised me.
I’d think that since there are so many options for score, it’d be a bit overwhelming and hard to figure out how to optimize. Whereas with approval it’s basically “vote for the minor candidates you like better than the major ones; and also vote for your least unfavorite major candidate.” Which is simple enough.
I can more clearly see the argument for three to five scoring options instead of approval. If you’re, say, a Warren supporter in the 2020 election (which of course is now a free-for-all approval voting bonanza) do you vote for Biden or not? If you don’t vote for him, you risk throwing the election to Trump; whereas if you do, you may end up giving the election to Biden over Warren. So a middle-ground-y thing seems reasonable here. (A counterargument here is that with polling, it can be more clearly seen whether a mass effort by the Democratic Party Establishment to get liberals in line is necessary, or whether people can coalesce behind Warren or Sanders or whoever.)
Three options nicely correlates with “like, neutral, dislike” and five nicely with “love, like, neutral, dislike, hate” as heuristics for honest voting. I’m just apprehensive about a hundred. I don’t even know how I’d vote with more than three candidates to rate on such a high scale, I shudder to think how a low-information voter would do it.
The trouble with Score is that optimal voter strategy there is to min-max your ratings—score(max) everyone you’d accept and score(min) everyone else—which would make it functionally equivalent to Approval if everyone did so; however, since not everyone will, voters who use the full score range are just voluntarily, albeit unwittingly, diluting their ballot power to determine the actual winner vs. voters who use min-max strategy.
E.g., suppose your favorite is a minor-party longshot, and your second choice is a major-party frontrunner; you might naively rate your favorite 5⁄5 and your second 4⁄5, but that doesn’t much help your favorite actually win since they’re a longshot, and it nerfs the support you give to your second who stands a fair shot at winning, so why pull that proverbial punch? It’s more effective, and more likely to maximize your chances of a satisfactory outcome, to just rate them both 5⁄5. Moreover, suppose you rate your worst-evil candidate 0⁄5 and your lesser-evil 1⁄5; sure, at least lesser-evil isn’t That Guy, but you really don’t want either to win, so why give them any support at all that might help them edge out someone you like better? It’s more effective to just rate them both 0⁄5.
STAR addresses that problem by giving voters a compelling reason to use the full score range, as the summed/average scores don’t determine the final winner, only the top-two runoff finalists, and then the finalist rated higher on more ballots wins, thereby making relative scoring relevant. Attempting insincere strategy here is about as likely to backfire as succeed, so voters might as well just rate each candidate sincerely using the full score range available.