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I came here to post this. I don't understand why Approval Voting and Score Voting don't get more love. The UX is easily understandable as we have been trained

I came here to post this. I don't understand why Approval Voting and Score Voting don't get more love. The UX is easily understandable as we have been trained to thumbs-up and X/Y star ratings on everything from yelp and netflix. A simplified version in the form of the old pick one UX could be provided for voters who don't understand the new mechanism. They both seem strictly better than what we have and yet I never hear anything about them. They even solve Arrow's Impossibility Paradox and have the confidence of Arrow himself.

macawfish 7y ago
FairVote has a lock on the "we need to change our voting system: this is the best alternative" message, and from what I can tell are dogmatically opposed to cardinal systems in general. There's also a history of bickering and personal attacks between different voting reform activists, including people in leadership positions. The various ordinal voting advocates (Equal Vote, CES, etc.) really need help on the messaging and movement-building front. A lot of lay people struggle to "get" the abstract framing these issues are often presented in. It comes easy to computer programmers and mathematicians because we're relentlessly trained to think abstractly about algorithmic tradeoffs and emergent limits of systems. But a lot of people just don't see why this issue is important. It just seems like an obscure focus.
- ClayShentrup 7y ago
  > The various ordinal voting advocates (Equal Vote, CES, etc. Cardinal. FairVote is ordinal (IRV).
elihu 7y ago
Fargo ND recently adopted approval voting (it was approved by voters by a wide margin), and there's a campaign to get an approval voting ballot measure in St. Louis. The Center for Election Science seems to be the main advocacy group that's pushing approval voting. They're a much smaller organization than fairvote.org, but they seem to be getting more funding and gaining momentum.
- ClayShentrup 7y ago
  Fargo citizens passed Approval Voting by a 64% landslide majority in 2018. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/1... St. Louis will likely adopt Approval Voting in 2020. https://www.electionscience.org/st-louis-polling-results https://www.electionscience.org/st-louis-polling-results STAR Voting will be on the ballot in Eugene, OR in 2020 and will almost certainly pass, given a previous county-wide initiative passed among Eugene voters. https://www.registerguard.com/news/20190828/star-voting-returns-with-dual-initiative-push https://www.registerguard.com/news/20190828/star-voting-retu...
jacques_chester 7y ago
Range voting is arguably the general case of approval voting and it has the same problem: candidates have no incentive to be honest about how the voting system works and most will campaign on "just mark 1" or "just give me the max score" in order to convert back to a FPTP. This is not a hypothetical concern, something like this has already occurred in Australian politics. Queensland switched from exhaustive preferential (IRV where all candidates must be ranked) to optional preferential (1-n candidates may be ranked) and then ran "just vote 1" as their campaign slogan. In doing so they obliterated the centre-right and further-right parties that traditionally operate as a coalition in Parliament. Relying on voters to be aware of the mathematics of a voting system and on candidates to represent those honestly is problematic. IRV is simple to explain, works well enough and can be efficiently hand-counted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- throw_away 7y ago
  So, your argument is that because this system has a feature that allows it to revert back to exactly what we have now, but also gives options so that more informed voters can better indicate their preference, and is otherwise strictly better, we shouldn't do it and stick with what we have? Arguments against IRV do not apply to SV/RV or AV. IRV and FPTP fall prey to shenanigans via Arrow's Impossibility Theorem because they require candidates to be ranked relative to one another (or you just pick the best one as in FPTP). Once they do not need to be ranked (as in two candidates can get the same vote from a given voter), then none of the Arrow problems apply. SV and AV are also simple to explain, work well and can be hand-counted. And they don't have the huge problem that IRV and other ranked voting mechanisms have.
  - throw_away 7y ago
    & how can IRV be hand-counted? It is the most difficult system listed here to compute and most difficult to explain to voters why the outcome happened.

macawfish 7y ago

FairVote has a lock on the "we need to change our voting system: this is the best alternative" message, and from what I can tell are dogmatically opposed to cardinal systems in general. There's also a history of bickering and personal attacks between different voting reform activists, including people in leadership positions. The various ordinal voting advocates (Equal Vote, CES, etc.) really need help on the messaging and movement-building front. A lot of lay people struggle to "get" the abstract framing these issues are often presented in. It comes easy to computer programmers and mathematicians because we're relentlessly trained to think abstractly about algorithmic tradeoffs and emergent limits of systems. But a lot of people just don't see why this issue is important. It just seems like an obscure focus.

ClayShentrup 7y ago
> The various ordinal voting advocates (Equal Vote, CES, etc. Cardinal. FairVote is ordinal (IRV).

elihu 7y ago

Fargo ND recently adopted approval voting (it was approved by voters by a wide margin), and there's a campaign to get an approval voting ballot measure in St. Louis. The Center for Election Science seems to be the main advocacy group that's pushing approval voting. They're a much smaller organization than fairvote.org, but they seem to be getting more funding and gaining momentum.

ClayShentrup 7y ago
Fargo citizens passed Approval Voting by a 64% landslide majority in 2018. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2018/11/15/1... St. Louis will likely adopt Approval Voting in 2020. https://www.electionscience.org/st-louis-polling-results https://www.electionscience.org/st-louis-polling-results STAR Voting will be on the ballot in Eugene, OR in 2020 and will almost certainly pass, given a previous county-wide initiative passed among Eugene voters. https://www.registerguard.com/news/20190828/star-voting-returns-with-dual-initiative-push https://www.registerguard.com/news/20190828/star-voting-retu...

jacques_chester 7y ago

Range voting is arguably the general case of approval voting and it has the same problem: candidates have no incentive to be honest about how the voting system works and most will campaign on "just mark 1" or "just give me the max score" in order to convert back to a FPTP. This is not a hypothetical concern, something like this has already occurred in Australian politics. Queensland switched from exhaustive preferential (IRV where all candidates must be ranked) to optional preferential (1-n candidates may be ranked) and then ran "just vote 1" as their campaign slogan. In doing so they obliterated the centre-right and further-right parties that traditionally operate as a coalition in Parliament. Relying on voters to be aware of the mathematics of a voting system and on candidates to represent those honestly is problematic. IRV is simple to explain, works well enough and can be efficiently hand-counted.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throw_away 7y ago
So, your argument is that because this system has a feature that allows it to revert back to exactly what we have now, but also gives options so that more informed voters can better indicate their preference, and is otherwise strictly better, we shouldn't do it and stick with what we have? Arguments against IRV do not apply to SV/RV or AV. IRV and FPTP fall prey to shenanigans via Arrow's Impossibility Theorem because they require candidates to be ranked relative to one another (or you just pick the best one as in FPTP). Once they do not need to be ranked (as in two candidates can get the same vote from a given voter), then none of the Arrow problems apply. SV and AV are also simple to explain, work well and can be hand-counted. And they don't have the huge problem that IRV and other ranked voting mechanisms have.
- throw_away 7y ago
  & how can IRV be hand-counted? It is the most difficult system listed here to compute and most difficult to explain to voters why the outcome happened.