Just use STAR. It's easy, it's fast. And you can tell the world how much you actually like or hate every candidate rather than an arbitrary ranking where the options could be God, Ghandi, and then Hitler, and then somehow two more people worse than Hitler.

See? Just a simple ranking gives extremely limited information about your preference. Just that A is ranked above B.

Like A and B the same? You cannot communicate that via a ranking.

Absolutely hate B? Again you cannot communicate that via a ranking.

You need a rating system with a set good and bad.

STAR does that. And in a single round of counting.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you want to include information about disliking candidates, you can include a "none of the above" option, which allows voters to star or rank candidates below "none of the above", effectively making those negative votes, because if "none of the above" wins, you re-run the election and none of the candidates who were on the ballot are allowed to stand again.

For example, with star voting + "none of the above", you could have voted 5 stars for your favourite candidate for president, 4 stars for "none of the above", one star for anyone else who isn't Donald J Trump and no stars for Trump, meaning that you supply very little support for the other not-DJT candidates to make it into the second round, but if it's Trump vs anyone, you still get to vote against Trump being president. By voting 4 stars for "none of the above", you get to raise the likelihood that the election is re-run if your favourite is eliminated, and hopefully your party stands a more popular candidate next time.

[–] chaogomu@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You have a slight misunderstanding here, which is my fault for not explaining the system.

STAR can handle any number of candidates because it's a Cardinal system. Meaning that you count the ratings independently. You can rate as many candidates as you want at 5 stars. Or Zero stars, or anything in-between.

That right there is the reason it's immune to the spoiler effect.

It also makes it, not immune to tactical voting, but resistant? Tactical voting exists, but using it actually gives you worse results. Your best results come from just being honest with your preferences.

Which is almost unheard of in voting systems.

Every other major voting system penalizes you for being honest.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

It's unclear to me what you think I have misunderstood.

(The fractional voting system penalizes you for being dishonest, but it's not a major voting system and doesn't pass the person-in-the-street trusts it test.)

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

(I only mentioned the fractional voting one because you didn't explain star voting at all so I had nothing to compare it with. I like star voting now that I know more about it having looked it up. If you want to convince people your favourite voting system is good, briefly explain it whenever you introduce it to a discussion, or link to an explanation!)

Star is pretty good, and its main advantage over fractional votes is simplicity.

But it's two rounds, not one. You can argue that you only enter the data into the computer system once, but that's true of fractional voting too - the computer system does the calculations, and it's not sensible to do fractional voting by moving pieces of paper around at all. If you want to have a paper-based system of counting, you need two rounds of counting anyway with star.

Star's disadvantage is that you can only express preference for the final round between 6 distinct candidates, and if there are enough candidates on the ballot, you start to lose information.

But these aren't important distinctions, neither are your points about ranking. The important points are:

Does it make a fair decision that represents the views of the electorate as they're expressed on the ballot?
Does it discourage forms of tactical voting so that the electorate are more likely to put their true views on the ballot?
Can it win and maintain popular support?

Fractional voting is slightly better at the first two, but star is far, far better at winning and maintaining popular support because you can't truthfully paint it as hard to understand like you can fractional voting and other forms of ranked voting, and you can report how people won in a clear and understandable way. Star is definitely better for public votes in hotly contested elections with low trust levels.

[–] chaogomu@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

STAR already has a zero rating. And because it a Cardinal system rather than an Ordinal. It's immune to most of the blatant flaws of Ranked Choice.

Really, Ranked Choice is just bad. It's a 200 some year old system that was first designed as a way to highlight the mathematical flaws of certain types of voting systems.

Some dumbasses found it again in the 1800s and thought, eh at least it's better than First Past the Post... Without ever actually testing that claim.

We should not be trying to "save" RCV, we should just abandon it for something that actually works as designed.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

STAR already has a zero rating.

What? I didn't say it didn't. I used zero in my example. But even FPTP has zero.

Unless you mean negative voting/voting against, which you only get by introducing a "none of the above" option so that the electorate can vote in such a way that even the most "popular" voted candidate can still lose because of the negative below-"none-of-the-above" votes outnumbering the positive votes - putting someone below "none of the above" in either stars or ranking makes it a vote against them whilst still enabling you to distinguish preferences between candidates who you would prefer were outright rejected even if your candidate can't win.

We should not be trying to “save” RCV

I'm not trying to save RCV. I'm saying star is better for public elections. Twice. At least.