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Comment by taywrobel | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any data around how many people in practice rank candidates between 2 and 4 (assuming a 1-5 scale)?

Given how polarizing politics tends to be, especially in a two party system such as America, I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.

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I don't have data at hand as I have not researched this topic in a long time, but from everything we know, people tend to not do only min or max. From everything we know, the majority of people don't vote purely strategically, specially when the voting system gives you serious disincentives to do so.

There is a clear intensive not to do that as it seriously hurts your overall preference. And Star Voting makes this even stronger compared to normal score voting because of the run-off.

Even if you assume that everybody is a 100% total party zealot it still only breaks down to approval voting and that is still a pretty good system.

> Given how polarizing politics tends to be,

Politics is polarized because of the voting system, if you look at actual data of preferences then you would see that there is far more agreement then can be expressed.

> I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.

You would lose that wager. Most people are not party activists.

But the thing is that's beside the point. Even if they do that, it still allows them to express approval of multiple candidates, instead of just one in plurality voting. And the fact that there's no weird elimination rounds means that:

- it's easier to teach people ("most votes wins")

- it's easy to double check the results ("most votes wins")

- it's incentive compatible (you never put someone you hope loses above someone you hope wins)

Even if you never use 2 – 4 on a 1 – 5 scale, it's still better because you're making the same decision for multiple candidates.

Only using the max and min scores in score voting / range voting has a name: approval voting. For each candidate, you're answering the question: "Would I be ok with this person being elected?"

Giving 5s to your preferred candidates and 1s to your disliked candidates is not necessarily a problem, as others have pointed out, that's just approval voting and a good technique in its own right.

If you want to avoid that, the runoff at the end of a STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is explicitly designed to incentivize voters to provide more differentiation between candidates.

NYC is an interesting example to use here because city and state politics are almost wholly dominated by one party. Instead of general elections being a Republican vs Democrat contest, you (in general) see elections around here being decided in Democratic primaries, along a spectrum that is generally far-left to center-right.

The presumed next mayor of NYC is going to be decided within the democratic party primaries today (or over the coming weeks as rounds of RCV progress), not in the general election later in the year. There's still a major spread of ideologies involved, but they're clustered within one party - which seems to have a lot of people thinking tactically about their votes, instead of just going straight-up party line.

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