3 ms·
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 cons
by 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 agoSo the system would be bad because people voted for the wrong guy?
- elihu 6y agoA 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 agoUnfortunately, Approval Voting cannot deliver the best candidate for the job when analyzing the Bayesian Regret. Only minimized best via Score Voting.
- elihu 6y agoI 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/
- nathias 6y agoI'd say metagame would come down fast and everyone that voted would be voting with 'strongly-held opinions', so the real issue is probably just how strongly can you be for one candidate and limit that.