Negative Score Voting
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It seems obvious to me, as an American, that a large number of people currently vote against candidates that they despise rather than for candidates that they prefer. Allowing voters to directly express their opposition to a candidate while leaving a neutral opinion for other candidates makes sense, especially if we want to maintain the ability to include write-ins. This would cause polarizing candidates to have a low score compared to moderate but less well-known candidates, which seems to be a good characteristic if the goal is to choose a consensus candidate. Mathematically, the main difference is that the ballot score for an unrated candidate in this system would be equivalent to a 2.5 in the typical 0-5 scoring system.
I think that allowing for a score range of, for example, -2 to +2 would be sufficiently expressive for most purposes, and I prefer symmetry for the suppression of polarizing candidates. What are y'all's thoughts?
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I oppose this sort of thing on the grounds that it will create artificial support for unknown candidates by rating them near the middle of the scale.
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@jack-waugh a score of 0 is not really support -- it is merely the absence of opposition. I posit that this is a better representation of reality and is thus completely fair.
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Voters have grounds to oppose to the fullest, any candidate they do not know. That could be a dangerous candidate.
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@jack-waugh then perhaps the solution, though it would somewhat complicate the tallying process, is to allow each voter to select a baseline score for unknown candidates. I think there is a way to do it with just one count of the ballots and an algorithm that encodes baselines for unknown candidates by tallying up to a set representing known candidates and then adding that score to any candidate not in that set as a second (and much quicker) summation round.
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@k98kurz "allow each voter to select a baseline score for unknown candidates" -- Yes, that would satisfy my objection. I have advocated this in conversation with Warren D. Smith, who is for averaging rather than summing.
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@jack-waugh averaging would lead to the same result as summation if we average the score for a candidate across the total number of ballots, but if instead it was the average score just of those ballots that scored a particular candidate, then it would cause an even worse distortion for write-in candidates: someone could win with just a single vote.
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@k98kurz this is the most reasonable option. Although, I would bet that almost every voter would set this dial to the lowest possible score. So the “default default” should probably still be set to the lowest score, since almost nobody wants to gamble at the voting booth.
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@cfrank we could use the average baseline of ballots as the default baseline, though that would require two rounds of tallying. Or it could be set ahead of time by another vote. Now I am feeling how sensitive these matters of default ballot settings are. Of course, if the voting interface is digital, voters can be forced to choose their baseline rather than including a default value at all.
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@k98kurz I don’t think there should be any uncertainty in the default for a voter’s ballot.
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@k98kurz My intuition also initially led me to the idea of -2 to +2 scale with 0 as default. I unfortunately do not have my sources in order, but here are the conclusions I came to after further reading:
- A default mid position has some weird and unexpected consequences. You can get a system which rewards the most unknown candidate.
- Approval/score/rated systems by their nature create more positive elections with less smear. This was immediately observed in districts which switched from FPTP to Approval. When a voter rates two candidates independently in a 0-5 scale, they have the ability to punish both candidates which participate in dirty politics or reward both candidates who demonstrate bi-partisan cooperation. This is especially true in large fields of say 10-60 candidates.
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@kaptain5 I think that your first point only holds true in an election for which all known candidates are hated by the majority and thus rejected. I suppose I could test these theoretical issues under various conditions by forking the voter simulation project code and running some customized simulations. (Iirc, last time I looked at the code, it was incompatible with negative voting and secret/write-in candidates.) If I do, I'll make a new forum post to discuss the results.
To change the subject somewhat, I wonder if negative score voting with a default neutral score and no write-in feature would be valid as part of a legislative process. For example, it could be used to select sections to include in a draft piece of legislation, with every section with average or better positive score being included; this process could then also be used for addenda or maybe amendments. This might be a bit beyond the scope of what is typically discussed in this forum, but it is still interesting to contemplate.
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@k98kurz 3-2-1 Voting comes to mind for a method which uses a proper negative vote in the form of a "reject" option which is treated differently