ClayShentrup

no, approval voting is drastically better than ranking.

1. greater voter satisfaction, with virtually any ratio of strategic to honest voting. (i.e. "more resistant to strategy")

2. drastically simpler. (same ballot, precinct summable, lower kolmogorov complexity)

3. transparent: each result is a simple scalar sum of support, so third party and independent candidates don't have their support hidden from view.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.goo...

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-only-voting-reform-worth...

approval voting has worked great in fargo and st louis. https://approval.vote/

this!

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...

no, it would not be better. see voter satisfaction efficiency metrics from monte carlo simulation here.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...

score voting is simpler and better than STAR voting in every way, and approval voting is radically simpler and better in most scenarios.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-only-voting-reform-worth...

and PR is a red herring.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...

approval voting would be absolutely massive in impact, i think far beyond what you're imagining.

that's only true of federal elections, not universally tho.

LOL, it's cardinal (rated) not ordinal (ranked), but yeah.

i know. and my point was, that's irrational. other voters determine the election result YOU have to live with.

that person is STRATEGIC VOTERS, who are about 90% of the electorate. even if you want to vote honestly, you're still subject to the whims of other voters.

indeed, practically the only thing that matters in a voting method is the aggregate affect of what it achieves in light of other voters. YOUR vote will almost never make a difference. you could upgrade voting methods in exchange for giving up your right to vote, and you'd still be drastically better off.

it doesn't really matter how you define "honest". what matters is how people actually vote. the only really crucial distinction for "honest" versus "strategic" is that "honest" can't consider viability. in the simulations, we just use "approve everyone you like more than average". optimal strategy is to approve everyone you like more than the expected utility of the winner. https://rangevoting.net/RVstrat6

here's lots of detail. you can run the code for yourself. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegDum.html

here's a slightly different model from the late harvard stats phd, jameson quinn. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

don't "trust" anything. look at the data. you could also read the book "gaming the vote" by william poundstone.

score voting gets better results than the alternatives with ANY AMOUNT OF STRATEGIC VOTING.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

https://electionscience.org/research-hub/tactical-voting-bas...

> That gains it a point but there are much better methods.

utterly false.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html

> I vote my actual ranking

no you don't. take a warren supporter who votes biden to stop trump. that person ranks:

biden 1st, warren 2nd, trump 3rd

they don't want warren to be a spoiler.

http://rangevoting.net/TarrIrv

score voting is extremely good.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

compressing it to approval voting doesn't hurt very much and makes the ballot extremely simple.

> I don't see how.

i just showed you how. better average voter satisfaction, better resistance to strategy, etc.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

not to mention radically simpler:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/

https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/approval-votin...

IRV is a strategic mess that maintains a two party system.

wonk.blog/duopoly

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...

thanks for actually knowing what you're talking about.

no it does not.

http://rangevoting.net/CoreSuppPocket https://wonk.blog/duopoly

approval voting actually DOES and it is better in every other way too.

preach, brudda.

what's so bad about IRV?

https://www.rangevoting.org/CoreSuppPocket https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.goo...

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510 https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...

nailed it.

a common fallacy of basic logic.

with FPTP, strategic voting means NOT voting for your favorite. so at the very least, you'd "vote for the person you'd normally support under FPTP, _plus_ everyone you like better".

but in real life, a lot of people will use intermediate scores.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not, there are just utilities and _relative_ satisfaction. you want to get the most satisfaction possible from the options you have.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

approval voting is insanely good at this.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

massively false based on actual data. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/star-voting-is-simpler-than-...

this is dead simple. thousands of voters have had no problem. https://approval.vote/

if you really want to get into the game theory, here it is. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

it's the worst of the commonly discussed alternatives.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

LOL, people get it just fine. fargo adopted it by a 64% supermajority and st louis adopted it by a 68% supermajority.

https://approval.vote/

> You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.

but your actual strategy is to rank hillary in 1st because bernie can't win. or, in the case of my aunt, she preferred warren but voted biden to beat trump. she would have ranked them biden>warren>trump in a ranked election for that very reason. this is called "compromise strategy".

bro, approving both of them is better than being strategically forced to say that you prefer clinton to bernie or biden to warren.

it's ironic that approval voting is better, but people therefore often wrongly think it's less optimal, when it's actually _more_ optimal.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.goo...

you used to live across the street from me on harper street in berkeley by the way.

the voting method is HUGELY important.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RelImport

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

Read the book ADHD is awesome. I read the audiobook during a recent solo trip to London because my son was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago and I wanted to understand him better and be more patient with him. I think a lot of it he gets from me and I relate to a lot of this stuff where where, all I want to do is work on these crazy ideas all day. I co-founded a non-profit that does electoral reform because I want to optimize everything. I learned Esperanto I type on a dvorak key map etc. everywhere I look all I see is things to be optimized. but I'm able to manage it fairly well to hold down a software engineering job. I think he has not learned that yet so he struggles. but reading this book helped me see him and understand him better instead of just getting frustrated with him.

yes. election by jury is the good parts of sortition without the bad parts. https://www.electionbyjury.org/

approval voting is great. i co-founded a major non-profit that got it adopted in fargo and st louis. for election by jury i'd advocate score voting, since higher resolution is more valuable with small groups.