i saw this discussion in which @gpshead suggested switching from approval voting to instant runoff voting to “better capture voter preferences and provide more meaningful feedback to candidates.”
this is true not just in the sense of determining a winner, but in terms of surfacing an accurate measure of support for non-winners as well, due to the later-no-harm flaw in IRV (causes it to fail precinct summability).
more sophisticated ranking methods such as condorcet can in some models slightly outperform approval voting and even score voting (approval voting is just score voting on a 0-1 binary scale), but this very tiny potential improvement comes at great cost in terms of complexity, and lack of summability/transparency.
guido mentioned STAR voting here, which is basically the best single-winner voting method, per voter satisfaction efficiency metrics. some other methods can perform a scintilla better in certain strategy models, but STAR voting is radically simpler and more transparent.
full disclosure: i’m the co-inventor of STAR voting.
tl;dr - having an even number of options seems to have a benefit of tricking people into thinking more carefully rather than just lazily choosing the middle score. and having a 0 as the lowest score is extremely helpful in disambiguating cardinal scores from ordinal ranks, 1-2-3.
as for the number of options, STAR was initially proposed to have 0-9, but then it was later modified to be 0-5 since that seemed closer to familiar scales like yelp’s “star ratings”, and the greater accuracy has decreasing marginal utility.
i think a yelp competitor with zero star reviews could be a hit! funny enough, when i was the 2nd dev at sharethrough, we were in yelp’s old office on 650 mission. it’s a small world.
I was sort of surprised that blanks are zeros (assuming you sum stars)[1]. I found the relevant FAQ entry:
For the purpose of post-election data analysis, the number of candidates left blank, vs those explicitly bubbled in as a 0 does provide some additional data that could be interesting for campaigns, and could be published as part of the full election data analysis.
Do you know if there are any examples of such data published?
Naively, I thought a different blank score could conceivably reduce the importance of money in a political campaign or help polarisation. It also feels a little pessimistic that an unknown choice is the worst possible choice. ↩︎
This case study is interesting, because the runoff was very close and it turns out a large number of voters didn’t express a preference between the finalists. The article also speculates (based on affinity to first choice votes) that if voters had put more effort into expressing their preferences, the result would probably have been different.
I’d still be very curious to see blank vote data. But maybe a non-worst blank score is a red herring, and a better solution is that bullet voting leads to delegating your vote to your candidate or something.
the star team went with simplicity, for the sake of political viability. i doubt it makes much difference in practice.
This case study is interesting, because the runoff was very close and it turns out a large number of voters didn’t express a preference between the finalists.
first, it’s important not to focus too much on any single anecdote. we want to look at statistical aggregates over zillions of randomized elections, which is what our the aforementioned simulation authors did.
second, the right candidate still won as far as we can tell.
**Did the candidate who best represented the electorate win?
Yes. Kim Thatcher-R was the candidate who was the highest scoring overall, she also was the candidate with the biggest block of supporters. In the runoff, Thatcher was preferred by more voters than Smith, the other finalist, and she was also the Condorcet winner, meaning that in head to head match-ups she was preferred over any of her opponents.
Just a moderator note. Some of the posts here were temporarily hidden by automation concerned about a new user posting multiple times linking to the same domain unknown to the spam filter. I restored all the posts and marked them as not spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.
