5 ms·

Score Voting is the solution -- give candidates a score from 0-99 and take the highest average score. Works great to decide Olympian Gold/Silver/Bronze medalis

by sova 6y ago

Score Voting is the solution -- give candidates a score from 0-99 and take the highest average score. Works great to decide Olympian Gold/Silver/Bronze medalists. Plus, no vote is wasted, and bicameralism is transcended.

pstch 6y ago
Is the ballot for olympian medalists public ? What are the incentives for someone not to vote 99 for the candidate he wants to win, and 0 for all others ?
- CarVac 6y ago
  There's nothing wrong with that. You can also decide to vote against one candidate by giving everyone else 99, and that's okay too.
elihu 6y ago
Yeah, that (or approval voting, or STAR) would be a good system in a primary. In the general election, using plain score voting is a bit dangerous; if you consider a Trump vs Clinton race where all the Trump voters give him a ten out of ten, and most of the Clinton voters give her a six or seven, then Trump wins by a bigger margin than he did in 2016. (STAR fixes this with an immediate runoff of the top two after maximalizing everyone's vote.) But in a primary election, it might be good to get the candidate with the most enthusiasm behind them. One difficulty in implementing something like this for the Democratic primary is that it isn't very compatible with the delegate system. Maybe that's not entirely a bad thing and delegates should be done away with, but sometimes it's good to have a group of people at the convention who can make decisions if something unexpected happens to one of the candidates. You could have individual states adopt different voting systems for their primaries and just use them to allocate delegates. For instance, instead of allocating delegates proportionally to anyone with more than 15% of the vote using first-past-the-post ballots like we do now, allocate delegates proportional to their candidate's total score, perhaps with some cut-off (like, no delegates awarded if your score average is less than 4 out of 10) or a rule that only the top N candidates are awarded delegates.
- nathias 6y ago
  So the system would be bad because people voted for the wrong guy?
  - elihu 6y ago
    A system where a minority of voters with strongly-held opinions overrules a majority of voters with weakly-held opinions is a bit counter to the principles of democracy, I think. Or another way of looking at it is that most voting systems grant more influence to strategic voters than honest voters, but score voting (also called range voting) does that to a greater degree than some other systems we could use instead. (One of the reasons I prefer approval voting over score voting is that there's less of a gap between strategic voting and honest voting. Everyone is forced to give a maximalized yes/no vote for each candidate rather than casting a lukewarm vote.)
    - sova 6y ago
      Unfortunately, Approval Voting cannot deliver the best candidate for the job when analyzing the Bayesian Regret. Only minimized best via Score Voting.
      - elihu 6y ago
        I assume you're referring to the graph that appears (among other places) on this page[1] about 3/5ths of the way down? You're right that score voting does better in that simulation when everyone votes honestly. But if everyone votes strategically, then score voting and approval voting are the same. (This makes sense because tactical score voting is mostly just score voting with maximalized votes, which is basically the same as approval voting.) Using approval voting basically forces everyone to use tactical voting. Which might be less good in some metrics but it ensures that all voters have basically the same amount of influence, as opposed to tactical voters having more influence than honest voters. I think having equal influence is pretty important. I'm not sure if this simulation that everyone likes to cite has been run more recently with STAR voting. That would be interesting. [1] https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
notSupplied 6y ago
Score voting results in tactical voting where only the most extreme scores are given, instead of revealing their "true preferences" on a grayscale. In fact, those who provide honest scores are disadvantaged, because the deciding-power of their vote would be lower than those who purposely exaggerate their scores to the extremes! It works in situations where there are few voters and their votes are all publicly visible.
- sova 6y ago
  Score Voting is the superset of all voting methods. It is quite alright that some people would vote that way, an equivalent style to an Approval ballot. It is difficult to argue that more resolution is worse -- we desire more resolution in our phone screens and monitors, because we get a clearer picture.
  - yyyk 6y ago
    HN is populated by many software engineers, we understand the principle of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. Voters can be asked for an ordinal preference order or for approval. 99% of voters have these and can explain their choices (which isn't to say their choices are necessarily logical/rational). Voters do not as a rule have a mathematical score for a candidate, excluding the case where they score equivalently to Approval. Take a candidate which you did not vote for but do not hate, is your score for the candidate 1, 2 or 3.141529? Can you give an explanation for your score and why it is that exact value and not a bit higher or lower? Asking people for information they do not have (a mathematical score for each candidate) leads to GIGO - unless just about everyone does Approval, in which case Score's just a more complicated, worse version of Approval.
    - sova 6y ago
      While it's not my first choice, we could offer multiple versions of ballots that were translated to Score Voting canonical ballots. If you want the deeper resolution, you can have it. If you want to do FPTP you can have a ballot that masks a Score Voting ballot and simply votes just one person a 99. If you want an approval voting ballot, it masks a Score Voting ballot giving all your choices a 99. Score Voting is still the superset, the appearance would be cosmetic -- however, I am willing to concede that confusing ballot appearances do affect outcomes.
yyyk 6y ago
Score voting will increase polarization to levels unseen even in 2020 America, for no practical benefit over approval voting. Score's tactical logic leads to most voters giving the extreme scores to every candidate, and psychology means all these voters will end up justifying it to themselves - leading to extreme polarization when the losing side is convinced the winner has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The last presidential term showed what happens than, now repeat that for all levels of government all the time. Worst of all, some very few people will actually give partial scores. Why is that bad? Well, what's the most common way to calculate scores today? There are various single-issue and ideological organizations which put out scores measuring representatives. Just about all these organizations represent absolutist POVs regarding their single issue or ideology (e.g. the NRA has a score for every representative). So to get a high score, representatives are pushed to extremes.
nullsense 6y ago
I'd score Trump a zero.
simonbarker87 6y ago
Single transferable vote is significantly better, 0-99 and everyone would just give the “least worst option” 99
- sova 6y ago
  Arrow got a Nobel prize for showing that ranked ballots are bad, mainly for the reason that when a candidate is dropped the results can change. The absolute best winner is not chosen consistently. Score Voting is the superset of all voting methods. Our Union deserves the best.
  - simonbarker87 6y ago
    Arrow said “Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times.” I think we’ve proved that FPTP works badly a lot of the time, time to try something else

by sova 6y ago

pstch 6y ago

Is the ballot for olympian medalists public ? What are the incentives for someone not to vote 99 for the candidate he wants to win, and 0 for all others ?

CarVac 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with that. You can also decide to vote against one candidate by giving everyone else 99, and that's okay too.

elihu 6y ago

Yeah, that (or approval voting, or STAR) would be a good system in a primary. In the general election, using plain score voting is a bit dangerous; if you consider a Trump vs Clinton race where all the Trump voters give him a ten out of ten, and most of the Clinton voters give her a six or seven, then Trump wins by a bigger margin than he did in 2016. (STAR fixes this with an immediate runoff of the top two after maximalizing everyone's vote.) But in a primary election, it might be good to get the candidate with the most enthusiasm behind them. One difficulty in implementing something like this for the Democratic primary is that it isn't very compatible with the delegate system. Maybe that's not entirely a bad thing and delegates should be done away with, but sometimes it's good to have a group of people at the convention who can make decisions if something unexpected happens to one of the candidates. You could have individual states adopt different voting systems for their primaries and just use them to allocate delegates. For instance, instead of allocating delegates proportionally to anyone with more than 15% of the vote using first-past-the-post ballots like we do now, allocate delegates proportional to their candidate's total score, perhaps with some cut-off (like, no delegates awarded if your score average is less than 4 out of 10) or a rule that only the top N candidates are awarded delegates.

nathias 6y ago
So the system would be bad because people voted for the wrong guy?
- elihu 6y ago
  A system where a minority of voters with strongly-held opinions overrules a majority of voters with weakly-held opinions is a bit counter to the principles of democracy, I think. Or another way of looking at it is that most voting systems grant more influence to strategic voters than honest voters, but score voting (also called range voting) does that to a greater degree than some other systems we could use instead. (One of the reasons I prefer approval voting over score voting is that there's less of a gap between strategic voting and honest voting. Everyone is forced to give a maximalized yes/no vote for each candidate rather than casting a lukewarm vote.)
  - sova 6y ago
    Unfortunately, Approval Voting cannot deliver the best candidate for the job when analyzing the Bayesian Regret. Only minimized best via Score Voting.
    - elihu 6y ago
      I assume you're referring to the graph that appears (among other places) on this page[1] about 3/5ths of the way down? You're right that score voting does better in that simulation when everyone votes honestly. But if everyone votes strategically, then score voting and approval voting are the same. (This makes sense because tactical score voting is mostly just score voting with maximalized votes, which is basically the same as approval voting.) Using approval voting basically forces everyone to use tactical voting. Which might be less good in some metrics but it ensures that all voters have basically the same amount of influence, as opposed to tactical voters having more influence than honest voters. I think having equal influence is pretty important. I'm not sure if this simulation that everyone likes to cite has been run more recently with STAR voting. That would be interesting. [1] https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/

notSupplied 6y ago

Score voting results in tactical voting where only the most extreme scores are given, instead of revealing their "true preferences" on a grayscale. In fact, those who provide honest scores are disadvantaged, because the deciding-power of their vote would be lower than those who purposely exaggerate their scores to the extremes! It works in situations where there are few voters and their votes are all publicly visible.

sova 6y ago
Score Voting is the superset of all voting methods. It is quite alright that some people would vote that way, an equivalent style to an Approval ballot. It is difficult to argue that more resolution is worse -- we desire more resolution in our phone screens and monitors, because we get a clearer picture.
- yyyk 6y ago
  HN is populated by many software engineers, we understand the principle of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. Voters can be asked for an ordinal preference order or for approval. 99% of voters have these and can explain their choices (which isn't to say their choices are necessarily logical/rational). Voters do not as a rule have a mathematical score for a candidate, excluding the case where they score equivalently to Approval. Take a candidate which you did not vote for but do not hate, is your score for the candidate 1, 2 or 3.141529? Can you give an explanation for your score and why it is that exact value and not a bit higher or lower? Asking people for information they do not have (a mathematical score for each candidate) leads to GIGO - unless just about everyone does Approval, in which case Score's just a more complicated, worse version of Approval.
  - sova 6y ago
    While it's not my first choice, we could offer multiple versions of ballots that were translated to Score Voting canonical ballots. If you want the deeper resolution, you can have it. If you want to do FPTP you can have a ballot that masks a Score Voting ballot and simply votes just one person a 99. If you want an approval voting ballot, it masks a Score Voting ballot giving all your choices a 99. Score Voting is still the superset, the appearance would be cosmetic -- however, I am willing to concede that confusing ballot appearances do affect outcomes.

yyyk 6y ago

Score voting will increase polarization to levels unseen even in 2020 America, for no practical benefit over approval voting. Score's tactical logic leads to most voters giving the extreme scores to every candidate, and psychology means all these voters will end up justifying it to themselves - leading to extreme polarization when the losing side is convinced the winner has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The last presidential term showed what happens than, now repeat that for all levels of government all the time. Worst of all, some very few people will actually give partial scores. Why is that bad? Well, what's the most common way to calculate scores today? There are various single-issue and ideological organizations which put out scores measuring representatives. Just about all these organizations represent absolutist POVs regarding their single issue or ideology (e.g. the NRA has a score for every representative). So to get a high score, representatives are pushed to extremes.

nullsense 6y ago

I'd score Trump a zero.

simonbarker87 6y ago

Single transferable vote is significantly better, 0-99 and everyone would just give the “least worst option” 99

sova 6y ago
Arrow got a Nobel prize for showing that ranked ballots are bad, mainly for the reason that when a candidate is dropped the results can change. The absolute best winner is not chosen consistently. Score Voting is the superset of all voting methods. Our Union deserves the best.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  Arrow said “Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times.” I think we’ve proved that FPTP works badly a lot of the time, time to try something else