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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

If you're doing a new thing anyway then it makes no sense to do something worse instead of something better. Popularity is determined by people; make the better thing the popular one.

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It absolutely makes sense. You need buy in from the public. RCV is the most known alternative and it has taken a decade to get it that far. If you want to start the work of informing people about STAR voting then be my guess but RCV is a tremendous improvement from what we have and an acceptable alternative.

Personally I think “approval voting” is almost as good as RCV but orders of magnitude easier to sell to the public.

There’s just a checkbox next to each candidate and you check the box next to any candidate you’re “okay” with. Results in the most “okay-est” candidates getting elected so when the winner is announced everyone goes “…okay.”

Also could make primaries less important, because multiple candidates from a party could theoretically run for the general election without splitting votes.

Communication is easier because in RCV the candidate who gets the most #1 votes doesn’t necessarily win which could lead to a loss of confidence in the system. Its very easy to tell the American public “this guy got the most checkmarks” and no one gets confused.

If I recall the problem with approval voting is that it is much easier to tamper with than RCV. Filling in an empty bubble is a lot easier than changing the order of ranking on a ballot

That’s a good point. Seems like that could be a problem for current ballots too - add a second checkmark to invalidate ballots voting for the “other” guy. Doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue, but detecting it for current ballots would be more obvious.

Maybe that breaks this idea. Maybe ideally you’d maybe want a touchscreen+printer to fill in the bubbles with printer ink and show it to the voter for them to double-check before putting in the stack (or, if wrong bubble filled, put it in rejected stack).

Would love more feedback from people to get a better sense of all pros and cons.

The exact mechanism won’t be standardized, some places fill in ballots with pen today, let the voter feed it into the machine and optically scans to tabulate, and others use a computer that tabulates and (usually?) spools a paper record that’s behind a window so the voter can see that the paper record is accurate. The important part is the actual methodology itself.

no it's not a good point, it's the complete opposite of reality.

http://scorevoting.net/StratHonMix

it's utterly the opposite of that.

http://scorevoting.net/StratHonMix

Most people don't actually know anything about any of this. If they've heard of RCV at all their understanding of it is at the level of "it's something different than the status quo and supposedly better". You could swap in STAR and they mostly wouldn't even notice that you've changed anything. But you'd notice the difference in the election outcomes, in a good way.

Enough people know about it that it has been put on ballots in several states and has had strong pushes in other states while STAR hasn't at all. If you want to get outside and start informing people about STAR then please do but RCV has a decade long head start and is the path of least resistance.

this is a fallacy my team has been talking about for 20 years.

https://www.rangevoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html

tl;dr IRV is extremely poor, doesn't actually solve the vote splitting problem, and is radically more complex and cumbersome than superior alternatives like approval voting, which would plausibly scale far faster once gotten off the ground. plus approval voting was adopted by 2/3 majorities in fargo and st louis, so we know it's politically viable.

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