New polling results released just weeks away from Election Day show a
majority of Americans want to replace the Electoral College with popular
vote system.
Approval voting still encourages strategic voting and “dishonesty” and does not strongly correlate with actual preference. If there are three candidates, Love, Tolerate, and Hate, 60% could strongly prefer Love, and 30% strongly prefer Hate, but both groups would prefer Tolerate over the other alternative, then Love voters would be smart to not make a second choice even though they would approve of Tolerate.
Australia has optional preferential voting. If there is 10 candidates, you can list them in order you want, but you don’t have to pick them all. You can stop at any point. Pick 3 or 4 in order, or say 7, but you don’t have to rank the nazi at all.
I don’t see the point. In preferential voting you choose your candidates in a ranked order, so if number 5 doesn’t make the cut in the final count, your next vote (number 4) kicks in, and so on. Not exactly - all number 1 votes are tallied, and the losers are eliminated and then the second vote from the loser candidate gets tallied and so on until the winner is chosen. In this way your ranked choice is never exhausted until a winner arises. Your number 3 choice may get voted in. All votes are potentially important. FPTP sounds like a crap shoot.
Because that may be the most accurate description of your actual preference, which is what a vote should be.
If your vote retabulates when someone is eliminated, you still need to be strategic with your rankings. you want to make sure that your preferred candidates are not eliminated, but you also want to make sure that you’re ranking doesn’t cause one of your preferred candidates to be eliminated prematurely. with star voting, vote always counts.
I’m afraid that I still don’t get it, most probably because I am thick.
Someone has to be eliminated. That’s the whole point of elections. OPV means that your choice counts, well your preferences do. It also means that you don’t have to vote for the person you don’t want to, but you can rank your preferences. It is very rare that I would rank a bunch of people the same value. It is generally easy to rank candidates.
In our senate we sometimes have to rank over 100 candidates. If you do that you must number every box and can’t make a mistake. Or, the parties have registered their preferences and you just tick one box for your chosen party and that’s it. So it’s either one box ticked or 100 or so. The optional thing is that you don’t have to pick all 100, but that changes sometimes due to party politics playing with the system. One the whole, our electoral system limits how much political parties can mess about with elections. For instance, no party chooses electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering doesn’t happen here anymore. It used to, but not now.
Your system sounds fine. The benefits of STAR over OPV is just the two situations you described. One, you can rank two choices the same, and two, you can modify your preferences by adding or erasing stars.
The downside to Star voting is that you should have at least as many stars as candidates. But if there were 100 options, that’s going to be a massive ballot no matter what you do.
Approval voting is where you mark any number of candidates that you want, and the person with the most marks is the elected person.
The most important issues with a fair voting system are eliminated by this method. Strategic voting will always happen under our performative democracy, which means that all parties are pathways for getting close to the actual goal. It’s only a problem if people are overly worried about genuinely “voting your truth”.
Approval voting counts all “approve” votes equally, which doesn’t eliminate the spoiler effect or create a more fair system than FPtP. Star voting eliminates the benefits of strategic voting and creates the most fair and accurate system possible. Genuinely voting your truth is the only measure of a fair election.
how does approval voting allow for spoilers? The experts that study election systems consider it eliminated under approval voting. It’s literally impossible to be a spoiler, because there’s nothing to spoil. There could be 4 real candidates and 16 no-name candidates, and nothing would prevent people from voting for 18 candidates. All of the eliminations you’re concerned about happen all at once, because it’s about having the most total votes. Votes for “spoilers” does literally nothing to affect the chances of other candidates.
As for “genuine voting”, how does one determine whether a vote was strategic vs genuine? Why does everyone have to conform to a ranked system that is highly susceptible to runoff upsets? I don’t care if people vote strategically, because if the options are check boxes or not, strategy is very limited. STAR is based on instant runoffs with a bit of range voting mixed in. Both are highly susceptible to strategy, as well as several undesirable traits that don’t exist with approval. Please explain to me how it prevents strategic voting.
Approval voting is the only method that meets all the requirements for a fair election without elevating an unpopular candidate.
Approval voting still encourages strategic voting and “dishonesty” and does not strongly correlate with actual preference. If there are three candidates, Love, Tolerate, and Hate, 60% could strongly prefer Love, and 30% strongly prefer Hate, but both groups would prefer Tolerate over the other alternative, then Love voters would be smart to not make a second choice even though they would approve of Tolerate.
Australia has optional preferential voting. If there is 10 candidates, you can list them in order you want, but you don’t have to pick them all. You can stop at any point. Pick 3 or 4 in order, or say 7, but you don’t have to rank the nazi at all.
That’s pretty much star voting, except you can give candidates the same ranking
Ok. But why rank them the same?
I don’t see the point. In preferential voting you choose your candidates in a ranked order, so if number 5 doesn’t make the cut in the final count, your next vote (number 4) kicks in, and so on. Not exactly - all number 1 votes are tallied, and the losers are eliminated and then the second vote from the loser candidate gets tallied and so on until the winner is chosen. In this way your ranked choice is never exhausted until a winner arises. Your number 3 choice may get voted in. All votes are potentially important. FPTP sounds like a crap shoot.
There’s no runoff If I remember, all your votes are tallied instantly, so you rank them the same if you feel the same towards them
Ok
Because that may be the most accurate description of your actual preference, which is what a vote should be.
If your vote retabulates when someone is eliminated, you still need to be strategic with your rankings. you want to make sure that your preferred candidates are not eliminated, but you also want to make sure that you’re ranking doesn’t cause one of your preferred candidates to be eliminated prematurely. with star voting, vote always counts.
I’m afraid that I still don’t get it, most probably because I am thick.
Someone has to be eliminated. That’s the whole point of elections. OPV means that your choice counts, well your preferences do. It also means that you don’t have to vote for the person you don’t want to, but you can rank your preferences. It is very rare that I would rank a bunch of people the same value. It is generally easy to rank candidates.
In our senate we sometimes have to rank over 100 candidates. If you do that you must number every box and can’t make a mistake. Or, the parties have registered their preferences and you just tick one box for your chosen party and that’s it. So it’s either one box ticked or 100 or so. The optional thing is that you don’t have to pick all 100, but that changes sometimes due to party politics playing with the system. One the whole, our electoral system limits how much political parties can mess about with elections. For instance, no party chooses electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering doesn’t happen here anymore. It used to, but not now.
I shall have to investigate the STAR system.
Your system sounds fine. The benefits of STAR over OPV is just the two situations you described. One, you can rank two choices the same, and two, you can modify your preferences by adding or erasing stars.
The downside to Star voting is that you should have at least as many stars as candidates. But if there were 100 options, that’s going to be a massive ballot no matter what you do.
Ireland also has this. It’s great. I believe that’s what’s being referred to as “ranked choice voting” in this thread.
I would generally go quite far down the ballot though I do believe some stop at 1 or 2.
That’s certainly better than what we have.
Approval voting is where you mark any number of candidates that you want, and the person with the most marks is the elected person.
The most important issues with a fair voting system are eliminated by this method. Strategic voting will always happen under our performative democracy, which means that all parties are pathways for getting close to the actual goal. It’s only a problem if people are overly worried about genuinely “voting your truth”.
Approval voting counts all “approve” votes equally, which doesn’t eliminate the spoiler effect or create a more fair system than FPtP. Star voting eliminates the benefits of strategic voting and creates the most fair and accurate system possible. Genuinely voting your truth is the only measure of a fair election.
how does approval voting allow for spoilers? The experts that study election systems consider it eliminated under approval voting. It’s literally impossible to be a spoiler, because there’s nothing to spoil. There could be 4 real candidates and 16 no-name candidates, and nothing would prevent people from voting for 18 candidates. All of the eliminations you’re concerned about happen all at once, because it’s about having the most total votes. Votes for “spoilers” does literally nothing to affect the chances of other candidates.
As for “genuine voting”, how does one determine whether a vote was strategic vs genuine? Why does everyone have to conform to a ranked system that is highly susceptible to runoff upsets? I don’t care if people vote strategically, because if the options are check boxes or not, strategy is very limited. STAR is based on instant runoffs with a bit of range voting mixed in. Both are highly susceptible to strategy, as well as several undesirable traits that don’t exist with approval. Please explain to me how it prevents strategic voting.