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Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously

Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?

eyelidlessness 5y ago
I think it’s because most often advocates are not promoting a specific methodology but a broad set of possible electoral reforms. Even people who study this in depth (like the article author) get substantially different results based on what they value and measure, and by methodology. That’s not something a civics class is going to address for people who want more fair choice at the ballot box but can’t possibly know the outcome of one approach or another without seeing it in situ. Edit: I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who’s spent a lot of time reading on the subject and wouldn’t dare pick a favorite for my country (US) or locality. I just want the opportunity to try systems that are likely more fair.
- infogulch 5y ago
  This is one of the great aspects of states (localities in general) mostly governing themselves even in important things like voting. Some state tries something new, and everyone observes and can learn from the results. If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, but avoid being overwhelmed since each locality is dealing with fewer new things.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    One major drawback is that efficiencies of scale can’t be taken advantage of and inequities at scale are easier to propagate. So we have a very slow process that ends up disenfranchising a larger amount of people than I’d be comfortable with in a modern developed democracy. This is extremely evident when you start comparing how well governments run in other Western democracies.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      I meant to respond to GP earlier and you got to it before me admirably, but if I may be more terse: some of these states are still experimenting with rehabilitating the Confederacy.
vlovich123 5y ago
I feel like STAR in practice ends up being approval voting with more complexity. I just learned about V321 though - interesting concept for sure and also holds the important property perhaps as approval voting if I understood it - can be counted by hand once and you can figure out the results.
dataflow 5y ago
I'm not sure there's any voting scheme that people would agree shouldn't be changed.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. They are obviously and measurably superior when you construct a measure designed around their shared features while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations you actually might want to make are very basic (if you really, really want to make sure someone doesn't win, you can rank parties you're pretty unimpressed with ahead of them). A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want. If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of changing the outcome.
- jabl 5y ago
  OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5, B=5, C=1 if you think A and B are really close). Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Looking at the results of these simulations described in the article, and similar simulations using 'Bayesian regret', it seems that these issues tend to make cardinal systems better. Also, considering the various gotchas of voting systems, there is the famous Arrow impossibility theorem. However, it applies only to ordinal systems. There is no similar thing for cardinal systems.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    > Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.
    - jabl 5y ago
      > Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless. Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it reduces to approval voting, so why bother with the extra complexity of score voting? FWIW, I recall Arrow himself said in some interview that his personal favorite was approval voting. Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the point about strength of preferences. Since everybody has the same range from within to assign preferences, it's all about the relative preferences among the candidates. Doesn't matter if I hate candidate X with the heat of a thousand suns, I can't give that candidate a score of -1000, only the minimum, just like everybody else.
troydavis 5y ago
In Seattle, many of us reached the same conclusion as you did. We’re now trying to change Seattle’s primary elections to use approval voting: https://seattleapproves.org/ https://seattleapproves.org/ Approval voting is extremely effective at capturing voters’ preferences, simple to implement, and incredibly easy to explain - not just the ballot, but how the ballots are tabulated and how the winner is chosen. The entity you linked to, The Center for Election Science, has a “howto” for bringing better elections to your city or county: https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chapter-program/ https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chap.... That’s where we started and I can vouch for it.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > easy to explain What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms? The spoiler effect is simple to explain because we’ve seen it. A hypothetical centre squeeze isn’t. My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting. (I am still sceptical of it, though I welcome experiments like the one your propose in Seattle.) When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.
  - snakeboy 5y ago
    > When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place. Sounds like we are in need of some voting-reform voting reforms!
    - kortex 5y ago
      The solution is simple: ban FPTP and give regions X years to come up with a replacement. We can have one big natural experiment on which alternative method is best. One thing about the US for example, states get a lot of latitude on exactly how to conduct elections.
  - obelos 5y ago
    I just don't see any evidence that IRV can be considered a stepping stone to truly better voting methods. Looking empirically at the matter, the places that adopt and later repeal IRV don't adopt better methods. They revert to choose-one. (Or in the case of Burlington, revert to choose-one and then confoundingly re-adopt IRV). Are there counterexamples I'm missing?
elihu 5y ago
I think there's a couple reasons. IRV has been around a lot longer and is used in other countries. (It was first used in Australia in 1893.) In the U.S. it's supported most prominently by FairVote, which seems to be a pretty well-funded organization. (FairVote calls the proposal RCV, and most media follows suit.) The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty small organization, though I think they've gotten a little bigger over the last few years. There's also some STAR voting groups. None of these groups have huge piles of money to spend. Then there's news organizations (including the NPR story posted here on HN today) promoting RCV/IRV. On its face, IRV seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. It's problems are complicated and hard to describe. The examples of non-monotonic results where voters can cause their preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too highly are counterintuitive and hard to follow, and I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking: "What? that doesn't make sense. You must have made a mistake somewhere..." There's also the common sentiments of "this is an emergency we need to fix right now" and "everyone's already on the RCV bandwagon" and "replacing a broken system with a half-broken system is usually politically more feasible than replacing a broken system with a not-broken system" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and so on. There are also criticisms of the other voting systems. Some people are bothered by approval voting's lack of ordered preferences, for instance, and score voting is susceptible to strategic voting where the most extreme rankings have the most influence. STAR voting mitigates that to some extent, but it's not perfect. I worry that we'll replace FPTP with IRV, find out later that it didn't live up to expectations, and then when voting reform advocates start pushing for something better like approval voting or STAR, the voters will say, "why should we believe you when a bunch of voting reform advocates promised unicorns and rainbows and we got a system that doesn't work any better than FPTP?" And then they'll either say to heck with all this voting theory nonsense and go back to FPTP or just live with IRV. And that's optimistically assuming that our future selves don't just abandon democracy itself as an unworkable idea (and though I reject that premise I have to concede that there's no lack of evidence pointing in that direction).
- kortex 5y ago
  IRV has a non-complicate-to-explain problem: you can screw up the ballot and invalidate your vote. > Unlike many single-winner methods, instant-runoff cannot accept equal rankings, and must discard ballots with multiple first-preferred remaining alternatives: such ballots would be equivalent to casting multiple ballots in a plurality election With all-the hubbub on the last election about vote validity, and hanging chads before that, the last thing we need is screw-up-able ballots. IMHO we should not even consider any methods in which you can violate invariants on a paper ballot. That rules out FPTP, IRV, and any others where the user with pen-and-paper can enter an invalid state. Err, I guess that rules out 321, which is my new favorite. Simple fix: just count multi Bad/Ok/Good entries toward that total. In the first round, you only look at "good" scores, ignoring ok/bad. Then in the bad round, same thing. This ensures a) you can't produce a bad ballot b) ballot counts stay orthogonal for each category c) multi-entries kinda average out. E2: well I guess you can manage to screw up ANY style of paper ballot and violate some invariant. I guess it matters the difficulty of screwing it up and whether it's recoverable.
IshKebab 5y ago
Probably because IRV is easier to actually do and doesn't really have any "free variables" in how you should behave. For example if I strongly like candidate A and I like candidate B a bit less then I should obviously rank them first and second. What about scoring? Should I give them 10, 9? But will that penalise B when A is eliminated? Similarly should I give them Good, Good, or Good, Approve? You kind of have to keep the whole voting system model in your head to decide. You might not think it's very difficult but even ranking candidates is too complicated for most people. Anything more complicated than that has no chance in the real world.
godelski 5y ago
Honestly I think we just need some big name to advocate for STAR (or any cardinal system). IRV really took off after CGP Grey's video and gained WAY more support after Hasan Minhaj's episode. The only places I see people talking about cardinal systems are Hacker News and the Yang subreddit (though lots of armchair experts advocating for condorcet methods because they don't see criteria other than VSE as being important). I would not expect cardinal methods to enter the public discourse until some famous person talks about it.
lamename 5y ago
Maybe, but as I understand it, within voting system reform there's at least one big practical conflict: the tradeoff between 'the best' vs. the simplest voting system that you can convince people is marginally better. The average voter has no clue what's wrong with the current system. Proponents of one system over the other worry that voters will get confused, or worse, that established groups that disagree with the reform could attack a new voting system as too complicated. Personally I think this is part of the reason approval has gotten more traction than score or STAR systems, but who's to say. The Center for Election Science has better PR and web design than https://www.rangevoting.org/ https://www.rangevoting.org/, which largely advocates for Score voting. But it's a multifaceted issue. Academics argue over different methods, and even as a casual observer it seems pretty clear that no system is flawless. For anyone who hasn't read "Gaming the Vote" by Poundstone, it's a useful introduction that discusses both the academic study and practical use of voting systems.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

I think it’s because most often advocates are not promoting a specific methodology but a broad set of possible electoral reforms. Even people who study this in depth (like the article author) get substantially different results based on what they value and measure, and by methodology. That’s not something a civics class is going to address for people who want more fair choice at the ballot box but can’t possibly know the outcome of one approach or another without seeing it in situ. Edit: I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who’s spent a lot of time reading on the subject and wouldn’t dare pick a favorite for my country (US) or locality. I just want the opportunity to try systems that are likely more fair.

infogulch 5y ago
This is one of the great aspects of states (localities in general) mostly governing themselves even in important things like voting. Some state tries something new, and everyone observes and can learn from the results. If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, but avoid being overwhelmed since each locality is dealing with fewer new things.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  One major drawback is that efficiencies of scale can’t be taken advantage of and inequities at scale are easier to propagate. So we have a very slow process that ends up disenfranchising a larger amount of people than I’d be comfortable with in a modern developed democracy. This is extremely evident when you start comparing how well governments run in other Western democracies.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    I meant to respond to GP earlier and you got to it before me admirably, but if I may be more terse: some of these states are still experimenting with rehabilitating the Confederacy.

vlovich123 5y ago

I feel like STAR in practice ends up being approval voting with more complexity. I just learned about V321 though - interesting concept for sure and also holds the important property perhaps as approval voting if I understood it - can be counted by hand once and you can figure out the results.

dataflow 5y ago

I'm not sure there's any voting scheme that people would agree shouldn't be changed.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. They are obviously and measurably superior when you construct a measure designed around their shared features while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences.

infogulch 5y ago
Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.
- notahacker 5y ago
  The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations you actually might want to make are very basic (if you really, really want to make sure someone doesn't win, you can rank parties you're pretty unimpressed with ahead of them). A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want. If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of changing the outcome.

jabl 5y ago
OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5, B=5, C=1 if you think A and B are really close). Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Looking at the results of these simulations described in the article, and similar simulations using 'Bayesian regret', it seems that these issues tend to make cardinal systems better. Also, considering the various gotchas of voting systems, there is the famous Arrow impossibility theorem. However, it applies only to ordinal systems. There is no similar thing for cardinal systems.
- vintermann 5y ago
  > Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.
  - jabl 5y ago
    > Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless. Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it reduces to approval voting, so why bother with the extra complexity of score voting? FWIW, I recall Arrow himself said in some interview that his personal favorite was approval voting. Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the point about strength of preferences. Since everybody has the same range from within to assign preferences, it's all about the relative preferences among the candidates. Doesn't matter if I hate candidate X with the heat of a thousand suns, I can't give that candidate a score of -1000, only the minimum, just like everybody else.

troydavis 5y ago

In Seattle, many of us reached the same conclusion as you did. We’re now trying to change Seattle’s primary elections to use approval voting: https://seattleapproves.org/ https://seattleapproves.org/ Approval voting is extremely effective at capturing voters’ preferences, simple to implement, and incredibly easy to explain - not just the ballot, but how the ballots are tabulated and how the winner is chosen. The entity you linked to, The Center for Election Science, has a “howto” for bringing better elections to your city or county: https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chapter-program/ https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chap.... That’s where we started and I can vouch for it.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> easy to explain What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms? The spoiler effect is simple to explain because we’ve seen it. A hypothetical centre squeeze isn’t. My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting. (I am still sceptical of it, though I welcome experiments like the one your propose in Seattle.) When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.
- snakeboy 5y ago
  > When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place. Sounds like we are in need of some voting-reform voting reforms!
  - kortex 5y ago
    The solution is simple: ban FPTP and give regions X years to come up with a replacement. We can have one big natural experiment on which alternative method is best. One thing about the US for example, states get a lot of latitude on exactly how to conduct elections.
- obelos 5y ago
  I just don't see any evidence that IRV can be considered a stepping stone to truly better voting methods. Looking empirically at the matter, the places that adopt and later repeal IRV don't adopt better methods. They revert to choose-one. (Or in the case of Burlington, revert to choose-one and then confoundingly re-adopt IRV). Are there counterexamples I'm missing?

elihu 5y ago

I think there's a couple reasons. IRV has been around a lot longer and is used in other countries. (It was first used in Australia in 1893.) In the U.S. it's supported most prominently by FairVote, which seems to be a pretty well-funded organization. (FairVote calls the proposal RCV, and most media follows suit.) The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty small organization, though I think they've gotten a little bigger over the last few years. There's also some STAR voting groups. None of these groups have huge piles of money to spend. Then there's news organizations (including the NPR story posted here on HN today) promoting RCV/IRV. On its face, IRV seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. It's problems are complicated and hard to describe. The examples of non-monotonic results where voters can cause their preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too highly are counterintuitive and hard to follow, and I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking: "What? that doesn't make sense. You must have made a mistake somewhere..." There's also the common sentiments of "this is an emergency we need to fix right now" and "everyone's already on the RCV bandwagon" and "replacing a broken system with a half-broken system is usually politically more feasible than replacing a broken system with a not-broken system" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and so on. There are also criticisms of the other voting systems. Some people are bothered by approval voting's lack of ordered preferences, for instance, and score voting is susceptible to strategic voting where the most extreme rankings have the most influence. STAR voting mitigates that to some extent, but it's not perfect. I worry that we'll replace FPTP with IRV, find out later that it didn't live up to expectations, and then when voting reform advocates start pushing for something better like approval voting or STAR, the voters will say, "why should we believe you when a bunch of voting reform advocates promised unicorns and rainbows and we got a system that doesn't work any better than FPTP?" And then they'll either say to heck with all this voting theory nonsense and go back to FPTP or just live with IRV. And that's optimistically assuming that our future selves don't just abandon democracy itself as an unworkable idea (and though I reject that premise I have to concede that there's no lack of evidence pointing in that direction).

kortex 5y ago
IRV has a non-complicate-to-explain problem: you can screw up the ballot and invalidate your vote. > Unlike many single-winner methods, instant-runoff cannot accept equal rankings, and must discard ballots with multiple first-preferred remaining alternatives: such ballots would be equivalent to casting multiple ballots in a plurality election With all-the hubbub on the last election about vote validity, and hanging chads before that, the last thing we need is screw-up-able ballots. IMHO we should not even consider any methods in which you can violate invariants on a paper ballot. That rules out FPTP, IRV, and any others where the user with pen-and-paper can enter an invalid state. Err, I guess that rules out 321, which is my new favorite. Simple fix: just count multi Bad/Ok/Good entries toward that total. In the first round, you only look at "good" scores, ignoring ok/bad. Then in the bad round, same thing. This ensures a) you can't produce a bad ballot b) ballot counts stay orthogonal for each category c) multi-entries kinda average out. E2: well I guess you can manage to screw up ANY style of paper ballot and violate some invariant. I guess it matters the difficulty of screwing it up and whether it's recoverable.

IshKebab 5y ago

Probably because IRV is easier to actually do and doesn't really have any "free variables" in how you should behave. For example if I strongly like candidate A and I like candidate B a bit less then I should obviously rank them first and second. What about scoring? Should I give them 10, 9? But will that penalise B when A is eliminated? Similarly should I give them Good, Good, or Good, Approve? You kind of have to keep the whole voting system model in your head to decide. You might not think it's very difficult but even ranking candidates is too complicated for most people. Anything more complicated than that has no chance in the real world.

godelski 5y ago

Honestly I think we just need some big name to advocate for STAR (or any cardinal system). IRV really took off after CGP Grey's video and gained WAY more support after Hasan Minhaj's episode. The only places I see people talking about cardinal systems are Hacker News and the Yang subreddit (though lots of armchair experts advocating for condorcet methods because they don't see criteria other than VSE as being important). I would not expect cardinal methods to enter the public discourse until some famous person talks about it.

lamename 5y ago

Maybe, but as I understand it, within voting system reform there's at least one big practical conflict: the tradeoff between 'the best' vs. the simplest voting system that you can convince people is marginally better. The average voter has no clue what's wrong with the current system. Proponents of one system over the other worry that voters will get confused, or worse, that established groups that disagree with the reform could attack a new voting system as too complicated. Personally I think this is part of the reason approval has gotten more traction than score or STAR systems, but who's to say. The Center for Election Science has better PR and web design than https://www.rangevoting.org/ https://www.rangevoting.org/, which largely advocates for Score voting. But it's a multifaceted issue. Academics argue over different methods, and even as a casual observer it seems pretty clear that no system is flawless. For anyone who hasn't read "Gaming the Vote" by Poundstone, it's a useful introduction that discusses both the academic study and practical use of voting systems.