Now committers have experience with Approval and STAR voting for Steering Council elections. Let’s hear how it went! The voting method and the voting service are distinct parts of the voting experience, so please take a few seconds to weigh in on each.
The polls here are restricted to committers, but it’s all publicly viewable with no fixed closing date. No decision depends on this - it’s just an informal attempt to “get the sense of the room” while it’s still fresh on your mind.
As to previous voting services, I doubt many people even remember their names, so just think back on how the voting experience in earlier years felt to you compared to this year’s:
I’ve agreed with that multiple times already in other topics. This isn’t about how well it performs: it’s about human factors: how satisfied are people with their personal voting experience. You may not care about that, but they do , and while I don’t have an academic study to back this up, I think it self-evident that the happier voters are with their voting experience, the more likely they are to vote.
You’ve been advocating for Approval for a long time, so you must know that what sways most people isn’t “performs better”, but that they absolutely hate that plurality forces them into “lesser of two evil” choices. The ability to express more of what they believe, and have it counted, makes people happier all on its own.
For which the poll results here so far is strong evidence. Limited to an unusual sample of voters, many of whom were influenced by own low-grade years-long advocacy for STAR, but as I’ve also said before, I really don’t care whether the results the PSF sees generalize to the entire world. Here we just want an election method that works best for us, and how happy people are is very much a part of how we judge “best”.
I’m all but certain this election would have had the same outcome under Block Approval, but that’s only part of what matters here.
the ability to express more of what they believe, and have it counted, makes people happier all on its own.
only to the extent that they are ignorant of social choice theory. if you make the trade-off explicit by explaining to them that this more expressive ballot will lead to less satisfying election results, as would be the case by switching from approval voting to instant runoff voting. for instance, my 20 years of work in the space says the vast majority of them will take the less expressive option. and as system planners we want to be a bit paternalistic to the extent we have good evidence saying it really will make people better off.
I mean I think this is mostly harmless and it can’t hurt to have user experience information. I would just be extremely careful about how much stock to put into it. like if a bunch of people said they preferred instant runoff voting to approval voting, it would be the moral obligation of anybody schooled in social choice theroy to tell them, no you don’t and for your own good, I am going to make sure you don’t make the mistake of switching to that voting method. very similar to helping prevent vaccine skeptics from ignorantly choosing not to vaccinate their children.
Point taken, and appreciated, but the time for arguing about “works better” ended over a year ago. If you have new evidence that Approval “works better” than STAR, I haven’t seen it yet. Multiple people here dug into the evidence, across years, and all accepted Jameson Quinn’s large-scale election simulation results saying that, to the contrary, STAR works somewhat better than Approval. Our elections are very rarely contentious, though, so I expect no difference in outcomes.
The same people here indeed rejected IRV (under the USA’s name “Ranked Choice”) for “delivers worse outcomes” reasons. In technical language, the results suck in chaotic ways when there are more than 2 candidates all with significant support.
Thank you for posting this! Luckily between STAR Voting and Approval Voting you can really go wrong. Equal Vote endorses both. We’re happy as long as it’s not FTPT or RCV, haha. I’m so happy the community had a good experience with STAR Voting and particularly with BetterVoting.com .
Thank you for all your patience and support throughout the process. We’ll continue build on BetterVoting.com and hope to make it even better for you next time .
, and while I don’t have an academic study to back this up, I think it self-evident that the happier voters are with their voting experience, the more likely they are to vote.
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