4 ms·

Why not score voting instead? People can actually understand it and it gives even better results: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/

• crazygringo 7y ago
  To be honest, I do personally think score voting comes the closest to what is truly most democratic and accurate, even better than Borda. I hesitate to recommend it, however, because I'm not entirely convinced it's intuitive enough for the average voter to understand and apply properly. I'm also afraid it's too open to criticism of seeming overly "subjective", though I personally don't think it is. I would be very, very, very happy to have evidence that my fears are unfounded, however.
  • contravariant 7y ago
    The one thing I find iffy about score voting (or range voting) is that there's a decent chance people will just score everyone 5~8. This would give more voting power to people that deliberately only use 0 and 10. So I'd advocate approval voting. Just vote for the options that you find acceptable, the option with the highest acceptance rate wins.
    • pgcj_poster 7y ago
      > there's a decent chance people will just score everyone 5~8 That sounds incredibly unlikely to me. I don't think I know anyone who would rank both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as a 7. To the contrary, it seems like people will almost always put either 0 or 10, making it not much different from approval voting.
      • contravariant 7y ago
        That is a rather extreme example, but still I don't think many people will actually fill in a 0, plenty of 2s and 3s maybe. Besides, like you said, if everyone always puts either 0 or 10 then it's the same thing as approval voting anyway so it can't hurt to just use approval voting.
• elihu 7y ago
  A downside of score voting (aka range voting) is that people are likely to have less influence if they vote honestly. If we image the 2016 election replayed under range voting, I can easily imagine a lot of Clinton voters rating her 6/10 or whatever, and most of the Trump voters rating him 10/10. Even if you have a lot more voters that prefer Clinton, Trump still wins. An advantage of approval voting in that scenario is that it forces everyone to take an extreme position, yes or no, which is what a strategic voter would do. So, you'd have strategic voters and honest voters voting the same way and having the same amount of influence. Range voting would be great in a primary, though.
  • mjevans 7y ago
    Those who dilute their approval across potential winning candidates are under-represented relative anyone with an extreme view who would apply a dis-proportionate approval level to their smaller (maybe singular) set of approved candidates. The approval or not of a given candidate might best depend on who supports them _at all_ out of the entire population, over any position in the rankings. That would mathematically simplify to ignoring rank order, considering all rank voting sets as approval tracks, and always eliminating whoever had the least votes until a single winner is left. However that poorly reflects the preference of selecting the most desired winner, which is why other slightly more complicated algorithms were designed.
• amalcon 7y ago
  Score voting is approval voting, except that you are allowed to make the tactical error of assigning a score between the two extremes. This is always a tactical error, de facto the same as flipping a carefully biased coin for each candidate.