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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea.

STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar.

At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it.

Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.

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I’ll admit I didn’t read much further than that, yeah. It’s possible it’s a good system and I’m just put off by the unfortunate comparison.

My issue with all of these point- and range-based voting systems is that when you see the results, you might want to tweak your scores.

Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10.

So with extra information, range voting boils down to approval voting, and I think it all ultimately becomes ranked voting. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where I would want to change my rankings, even if I have information about the results. If I like both candidates A and B, but A slightly more, I’ll always put them at the top of my list and in that order.

Now, it’s true that in IRV there are scenarios where I can get a better result for myself by voting for candidate ranks in a different order; but those are rare (I think) and definitely unintuitive. In the example above, if B were a real long shot candidate, it might be worth ranking them above A in case B gets eliminated early. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference because, you know, B is a long shot. And that’s just IRV; other ranked voting systems are much more robust.

> Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10.

This is the EXACT reason STAR voting was invented. Unlike plain score, STAR has a runoff where it compares your preference of the top two and puts your full vote to your preference.

So, this is like an exact case study of why STAR is worthwhile. STAR proposes 0-5, but we can stick with 1-10 for this case. You vote 1, 3, 8, 10 and the top two candidates are the ones you voted 3 and 8. With STAR, it doesn't matter that your 3 candidate got a total score higher than your 8 candidate, your vote in the runoff goes to your 8 because that's rated higher. If more voters rated that candidate higher, they win even if their plain score total was lower.

Thus, you don't have to exaggerate all your scores. In fact, you have an incentive not to, because if you just give ties, you risk abstaining in the runoff instead of having a say there.

I mean literally you just spelled out the most common critique of plain score voting which is itself THE argument for why we should use STAR instead.

It sounds like STAR is equivalent (or at least similar) to the Condorcet-with-score-based tiebreaker that somebody proposed elsewhere (edit to add: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18395358 ) in this thread. I understood that one but not STAR. It needs much better explanation and marketing! Edit: doh, wait, STAR is in fact the exact opposite -- scores first, ranks as a tiebreaker.

I’m reading https://www.equal.vote/starvoting and I still don’t entirely follow. It’s lacking some detail I’d like to understand. For example, it looks like it is not a Condorcet method. That seems bad to me -- if you’re not electing the Condorcet winner, you need a very good explanation why; and I don’t trust an appeal to numerical ratings that each voter will interpret and use in different ways.

Aha, yes, Wikipedia has a clearer explanation and confirms that it is not Condorcet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system and is worth pushing as a good approach for real elections.

Thanks for being open-minded. I mentioned in my other reply (to your other reply) why Condorcet isn't strictly ideal. Discussing the edge-cases where STAR does not support the Condorcet candidate is too long a discussion, I can't get into it here.

One short point: the primary problem with not electing Condorcet is that coordinated strategic majority could, in hindsight and for future elections, force the Condorcet by refusing to support later preferences. In STAR, that strategy is risky and unpredictable. If the Condorcet is a strong case, it will win STAR anyway. If it's an edge case, nobody knows in advance if it will be the true majority or just a bit less, so strategically zeroing all by the favorite is so risky in that edge case, most people won't do it (it could backfire for them to refuse to support their 2nd favorites if their hail-mary hope that they just might have a Condorcet turns out to be wrong). No strategies with STAR are reliable. The best outcomes come from just being honest.

Note: STAR doesn't use rank as a tie-breaker only. It can flat-out overrule a score difference with the 2nd-highest scoring candidate winning. It's not just for ties.

> I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system

Well, since IRV gets pushed for real elections and STAR is better on a large number of factors, and both are better than FPTP…

You otherwise want to promote 3-2-1 https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting or approval or maybe some good PR approach like PLACE voting https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-the-elevator-...

If you want to discuss this stuff more with other folks, https://forum.electionscience.org is the place to go, btw

Here is my less-hot take: STAR is exactly back-to-front.

You’re combining ranked voting with range voting.

Ranked voting is objective and clear (the Condorcet criterion is very compelling) but unfortunately incomplete (Arrow’s theorem, which in this case boils down to unresolvable three-way cycles.)

Range voting is more tractable (counting is easy, no awkward cycles) but subjective (no-one knows what the scores actually mean) and prey to tactical voting.

STAR starts with range voting (so you lose Condorcet) and adds cut-down ranked voting as a final step (only after some rank information has been discarded; and ranking isn’t a sound way to resolve ties).

It would be better to use ranked voting first, then range voting to resolve tie-breaks. That would make better use of the unique advantages of each voting style.

Yes, STAR mixes rank and range to create a balance.

I still don't buy your assertion that no one knows what scores mean. That's no stronger of an argument than the opposing critique of ranking: nobody knows in a rank ballot whether it's a slight preference between two supported candidates or a huge difference between a liked and a hated (but maybe some other candidate is even worse) situation.

In both ranking and scoring, the ballot does not give a transparent view of the voters' beliefs. They only mean what they mean on the ballot, that there are relative scores or a ranked order. We can't and shouldn't assert that we can know more deeply what's behind those marks.

Condorcet is not a bad principle per se, but it's not the absolutely most desirable. If it were the only factor, nobody would accept IRV. And Condorcet means that a candidate who is 2nd choice of 100% of the voters, maybe even a strong 2nd choice (rankings don't carry that info) will always lose even in a case where all the other candidates are grossly polarizing and will lead to civil war. There are at least cases where a consensus is superior to Condorcet.

> It would be better to use ranked voting first, then range voting to resolve tie-breaks.

How does this proposed idea work? What actual system are you suggesting that would do this? EDIT: I see this referenced in your other post.

Condorcet means that a candidate who is 2nd choice of 100% of the voters, maybe even a strong 2nd choice (rankings don't carry that info) will always lose even in a case where all the other candidates are grossly polarizing

That's not correct, if there are 4 or more candidates.

If there were exactly 3 candidates the split would have to be something like 51-49, and then the candidate with 100% second place would come second. But it's arguable whether that's a bad result, and it seems like a very unlikely scenario anyway. Even 10% of people voting that candidate in first place would be enough for them to win it.

Yes, you're totally right. I was writing too quickly and mixed up that sentence's point.

What I meant to express was that the 100% 2nd choice candidate will lose to Condorcet winner if there's 51% support for the Condorcet winner. I.e. majority support. That's true also for non-Condorcet systems. My point was that Condorcet systems are always also strict majoritarian, and there are reasonable arguments that majoritarianism can be undesireable (such as cases of polarizing slim-majority winner.

I think this improperly confuses an axiom with an argument. What I mean is, some of this comes down to a question that asks what your values are:

If, in a two-candidate election, one candidate gets more votes, should that election be the winner, even if the losing candidate has more passionate supporters?

In democratic elections that respect one-person/one-vote, the answer to that question is simply yes, because that is the definition of one-person/one-vote democracy. Even if there are 100 voters, and it's 51-49, and the 51 voters are lukewarm while the 49 voters are passionate, the candidate with 51 votes wins. No matter what.

The reason that matters is because it is actually fairly slippery to measure passion. If one person submits a 10 rating, and another submits a 7 rating, what does that mean? It could mean that one person is passionate and the other person is lukewarm. But it could also mean that one person is emphatic while the other person is meek. Or that one person is authoritarian and the other person is abused. The entire reason we have one-person/one-vote is to make sure that voters are treated equally, even if society is otherwise telling certain people that they are "less than".

And for those sorts of elections, Condorcet voting is basically perfect. All the flaws people attribute to "Condorcet methods" are only attributable to when there are multi-member Smith Sets.

Now there are other kinds of elections; elections where we don't follow the one-person/one-vote principle. Smaller electorates, non-governmental, self-governing organizations. In those cases, "consensus" is more possible without risking systemic abuse. And in those cases, it might be entirely appropriate to award the winner to the 49% candidate with more passionate support. In which case you would perhaps choose something other than Condorcet.

What is this "push ahead" crap? I have no idea how that's different from the Amazon analogy.

You should come to terms with the fact that whatever you mean is completely unintuitive to many/most of us, and that almost everyone will just this like they use Amazon. Whether or not the page says "it's like Amazon" or "it's not like Amazon".

Calling something crap doesn't encourage constructive discourse if you're looking to actually gain something from a discussion. But I can ignore that.

The ballots are proposed as labeled "no support" to "most support".

It isn't entirely unlike Amazon, it's like Amazon if your standard for what's a 5, like "the best book" is "the best of THESE candidates". All people need to do to get the system is care about their impact on the outcome of the election in order to realize that 5 doesn't mean "love" or some other semantic thing, it just means the top of the options.

And if people just use it like Amazon and some give no candidate a 5, the system doesn't fall apart, it works pretty well anyway.

Is there evidence from real world trials that everyday voters do use STAR correctly? How many people use the full 1-5 (0-5?) range in their ballots?

STAR has never been used in a public election. At some point, we can't both argue about lack of evidence and against getting the evidence.

http://star.vote is not a controlled scientific survey or anything, but people overall seem to have no trouble using the full range.

In fact, in my anecdotal experience, even over years in the past when I told people about plain score voting and tried to get them not to use the full range (because I misunderstood that issue myself), many people insisted that they would use the full range anyway. A lot of people find it intuitive to give their favorite all the points they can.

But the real answer is that, yes, we need more studies and trials of all these things.

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