It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.
As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others.
And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
Of course, I'll take any of them over FPTP.
I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less likely / more contrived for score/approval voting to fail it.
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to avoid the hard right party getting in? Or do you vote "no" to help the center-left party beat the center-right party? (swap those directions to personal preference)
That's why I'd personally go with a simple three-level score vote: "yeah", "meh", or "nah". If people really want to shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring the "meh" option, then so be it, but at least the option is there for people to vote "meh" for candidates that are merely acceptable/tolerable (and reserve "yeah" for ideal candidates and "nah" for unacceptable/intolerable candidates).
To clarify, I never intended that as a defence of FPTP. It's awful and I'll take any of the systems being discussed here over it. It was a statement specifically towards IRV over score/approval.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
it's not even close.
Score voting calls for ambiguous, proven-to-be-culturally-variable ratings that have no natural relationship to preferences (and approval does the same thing in an opposite way, while score voting relies on ambiguous distinctions that don’t have a clear mapping from actual preferences, approval forces voters to rank with artificial ties that don’t have a clear mapping to actual preferences); most metrics simply do not reflect this because they have no mechanism to.
Where these problems don’t apply, as is the case many places outside of secret ballots for elections of public officers, score and approval can be great. E.g., open ballot approval on a choice of a group activity where voting “approve” is a commitment to participate if the selected option wins makes perfect sense, or open-ballot score voting where the given score is a commitment to provide some quantity of resources proportional to the score to the common effort if the item given that score wins. Then the ratings given are tied to concrete differences in preferences.
(On the other hand, choosing between single-winner ballot methods is mostly a waste of time regardless of the abstract merits of the particular system; the most significant difference within democratic systems in quality of government by popular engagement, popular satisfaction with government, and a number of other measures is with the degree of proportionality of the main legislative body, and no single-winner system is going to deliver much of an improvement there, you need a system designed for proportionality, which means multimember districts on some level.)
utter nonsense. the scores are just normalized utilities.
or, if you're being strategic, you're just min-maxing based on expected utility. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
> (and approval does the same thing in an opposite way
utter nonsense. approval voting is just a binary 0-1 scale instead of e.g. 0-5. the math in no way changes.
> while score voting relies on ambiguous distinctions that don’t have a clear mapping from actual preferences
utterly false. there is nothing "ambiguous" whatsoever.
> approval forces voters to rank with artificial ties that don’t have a clear mapping to actual preferences
of course it has a mapping to actual preferences. what you're _trying_ to say is that the transform from utilities ("preferences") to scores is LOSSY. the problem is that transforming to ordinal rankings is even MORE lossy, and this is why approval voting still outperforms ranked methods in general, especially with strategic voting taken into account.
we have several pages explaining this common myth to laypersons.
https://medium.com/@clayshentrup/expressiveness-6ef8c034bc65
https://www.rangevoting.org/Expressiveness
> the most significant difference within democratic systems in quality of government by popular engagement, popular satisfaction with government, and a number of other measures is with the degree of proportionality of the main legislative body
there's absolutely no evidence for this. you're making the "proportional representation fallacy". i address this here.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...
so virtually everything you just said was incorrect. which is why it's good to study this issue and talk to experts before forming opinions.
utterly false.
https://www.rangevoting.org/HonStrat https://www.rangevoting.org/Honesty https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance
1. this is true of _every_ deterministic voting method. it's mathematically proven.
2. even approval voting is extremely accurate. see voter satisfaction efficiency calculations from harvard stats phd jameson quinn, who served with me on the board of the center for election science. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
> RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
ludicrous. IRV is extremely vulnerable to strategic voting. my aunt who voted biden even tho she preferred warren (to stop trump) would do the same thing with ranking: rank biden 1st to prevent warren from losing to trump.
something similar happened in the first alaska house special election. palin was a spoiler. she caused the democrat mary peltola to win, even tho fellow republican nick begich was preferred to peltola (and to palin) by a large majority. in other words, palins supporters hurt themselves by honestly ranking palin 1st. they would have been strategically better off burying palin and ranking begich 1st.
and the VSE metrics show that even 100% honest IRV performs worse than approval voting with all voters being strategic.
IRV is simply one of the worst voting methods in existence. not to mention being radically overcomplicated and opaque.
i'm sorry that you posted this before having even an inkling about how any of this works.
Any change is also going to disadvantage the two current parties so they will be hostile to it. Which with the hard-to-amend US constitution makes things very hard to change.
Some form of proportional representation or maybe STV in multi-member districts is actually what you'd do. Single member districts with fancy voting systems just gets you a token 3rd party representation.
The problem is that US specifically has a political climate which can be summed up as, "the ends justify the means". While both parties still ritually extoll the importance of democracy and fairness, as soon as it's down to one particular wedge issue, winning is more important than preserving the integrity of the system.
To a large extent, this is because there's basically zero trust between differing factions - it is assumed that your political opponents will squeeze out every advantage they can out of the system when they are in power, no matter how unfair, and so when you are in power, if you don't do the same, you basically hand them victory on policy long-term. Arguably was originally Republicans who triggered this cycle during the Obama presidency, but it's hardly important now - the point is that once trust is broken, it quickly becomes a positive feedback loop.
So, getting back to electoral system, your average voter looks at those proposals to replace FPTP with RCV or whatever, and the first thing they ask is not, "is this more fair?", but rather, "how will this affect the balance of power?". And in any given constituency, the answer is that it will take power away from the current majority (or plurality) and hand it to their opposition. This is both obvious and easy to explain, so that's the usual agitprop angle, and it sells very well.