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It's true that ratings can feel a little harder to grasp, but just any concrete experience with the system, it's easy to get. Check out http://star.vote/ http:/

It's true that ratings can feel a little harder to grasp, but just any concrete experience with the system, it's easy to get. Check out http://star.vote/ http://star.vote/ and try for yourself. In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. You can give up to 5 points, like if there's a race, you can push each candidate forward as much as 5 steps. The only thing it means is that you pushed them forward more than another candidate. That's not that hard to get intuitively. IRV is not what people already do but in a single round, it's much more complex than that. And whoever's 1st choice in IRV loses in the final round, they (and that could be as much as 49% of the voters!) never get any of their other preferences counted at all, unlike either STAR or our current two-round system.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. Yes, so you import the well-known cultural variation in numeric rating systems without concrete semantics for rating levels into your voting system. That's a great idea. More data on ballots is good only as long as it has a consistent meaning and is used in a way that is consistent with that meaning. STAR (and other score voting systems) gather noise and pretend it is signal.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  STAR gathers scores that voters choose when looking at the pool of candidates. It uses those in tabulating the outcome. They have an effect. There's no sense in which this is noise. I don't even understand the claim.
iainmerrick 8y ago
I looked at the website. STAR Voting allows voters to rate all the candidates similar to how we rate books on Amazon Ah yes, Amazon, that site with famously reliable and unbiased user reviews. This is a terrible idea. It’s a bad voting system made worse by appeal to similarity with popular apps and websites, which themselves use a really bad voting system.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea. STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar. At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it. Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    I’ll admit I didn’t read much further than that, yeah. It’s possible it’s a good system and I’m just put off by the unfortunate comparison. My issue with all of these point- and range-based voting systems is that when you see the results, you might want to tweak your scores. Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. So with extra information, range voting boils down to approval voting, and I think it all ultimately becomes ranked voting. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where I would want to change my rankings, even if I have information about the results. If I like both candidates A and B, but A slightly more, I’ll always put them at the top of my list and in that order. Now, it’s true that in IRV there are scenarios where I can get a better result for myself by voting for candidate ranks in a different order; but those are rare (I think) and definitely unintuitive. In the example above, if B were a real long shot candidate, it might be worth ranking them above A in case B gets eliminated early. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference because, you know, B is a long shot. And that’s just IRV; other ranked voting systems are much more robust.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      > Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. This is the EXACT reason STAR voting was invented. Unlike plain score, STAR has a runoff where it compares your preference of the top two and puts your full vote to your preference. So, this is like an exact case study of why STAR is worthwhile. STAR proposes 0-5, but we can stick with 1-10 for this case. You vote 1, 3, 8, 10 and the top two candidates are the ones you voted 3 and 8. With STAR, it doesn't matter that your 3 candidate got a total score higher than your 8 candidate, your vote in the runoff goes to your 8 because that's rated higher. If more voters rated that candidate higher, they win even if their plain score total was lower. Thus, you don't have to exaggerate all your scores. In fact, you have an incentive not to, because if you just give ties, you risk abstaining in the runoff instead of having a say there. I mean literally you just spelled out the most common critique of plain score voting which is itself THE argument for why we should use STAR instead.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. Yes, so you import the well-known cultural variation in numeric rating systems without concrete semantics for rating levels into your voting system. That's a great idea. More data on ballots is good only as long as it has a consistent meaning and is used in a way that is consistent with that meaning. STAR (and other score voting systems) gather noise and pretend it is signal.

quadrangle 8y ago
STAR gathers scores that voters choose when looking at the pool of candidates. It uses those in tabulating the outcome. They have an effect. There's no sense in which this is noise. I don't even understand the claim.

iainmerrick 8y ago

I looked at the website. STAR Voting allows voters to rate all the candidates similar to how we rate books on Amazon Ah yes, Amazon, that site with famously reliable and unbiased user reviews. This is a terrible idea. It’s a bad voting system made worse by appeal to similarity with popular apps and websites, which themselves use a really bad voting system.

quadrangle 8y ago
It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea. STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar. At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it. Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  I’ll admit I didn’t read much further than that, yeah. It’s possible it’s a good system and I’m just put off by the unfortunate comparison. My issue with all of these point- and range-based voting systems is that when you see the results, you might want to tweak your scores. Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. So with extra information, range voting boils down to approval voting, and I think it all ultimately becomes ranked voting. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where I would want to change my rankings, even if I have information about the results. If I like both candidates A and B, but A slightly more, I’ll always put them at the top of my list and in that order. Now, it’s true that in IRV there are scenarios where I can get a better result for myself by voting for candidate ranks in a different order; but those are rare (I think) and definitely unintuitive. In the example above, if B were a real long shot candidate, it might be worth ranking them above A in case B gets eliminated early. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference because, you know, B is a long shot. And that’s just IRV; other ranked voting systems are much more robust.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    > Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10. This is the EXACT reason STAR voting was invented. Unlike plain score, STAR has a runoff where it compares your preference of the top two and puts your full vote to your preference. So, this is like an exact case study of why STAR is worthwhile. STAR proposes 0-5, but we can stick with 1-10 for this case. You vote 1, 3, 8, 10 and the top two candidates are the ones you voted 3 and 8. With STAR, it doesn't matter that your 3 candidate got a total score higher than your 8 candidate, your vote in the runoff goes to your 8 because that's rated higher. If more voters rated that candidate higher, they win even if their plain score total was lower. Thus, you don't have to exaggerate all your scores. In fact, you have an incentive not to, because if you just give ties, you risk abstaining in the runoff instead of having a say there. I mean literally you just spelled out the most common critique of plain score voting which is itself THE argument for why we should use STAR instead.