Score Voting Instructions for State Constitutional Compliance
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The current instructions for a 0 -5 Score Ballot:
Score the best candidate 5.
Score the worst candidate 0.
Rate other candidates in comparison.
Ties are allowed. Blank scores are equal to 0.For compliance with state constitutions that require a winning candidate to receive the “the highest”, “the greatest” or “the largest” number of votes, or “a plurality of votes” I propose the following explicit instructions:
Cast 5 votes for the best candidate.
Cast 0 votes the worst candidate.
Cast votes for the other candidates in comparison.
Ties are allowed. If you do not cast votes for a candidate, that candidate does not receive votes.Unfortunately, this will not work with STAR, BTR-Score, or Smith-Score. High dollar lawyers are our only hope for these systems.
The chief concern with Score voting is one-sided strategy.
To make strategy a little less one-sided, substitute “the best” with “your preferred” and “the worst” with “your least preferred”:
Cast 5 votes for your preferred candidate.
Cast 0 votes your least preferred candidate.
Cast votes for the other candidates in comparison.
Ties are allowed. If you do not cast votes for a candidate, that candidate does not receive votes.Yes, this moves us down the slippery slope towards Approval, but that’s ok.
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@gregw in terms of it being ok, I agree in the sense that the slippery slope to approval leaves us in a pretty decent position.
Part of me even supports Score just because it does slip into Approval, which I already support.
score-stratified-condorcet [10] cardinal-condorcet [9] ranked-condorcet [8] score [7] approval [6] ranked-bucklin [5] star [4] ranked-irv [3] ranked-borda [2] for-against [1] distribute [0] choose-one [0]
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Another possibility:
Cast 5 votes for your favorite candidate.
Cast 0 votes the worst candidate.
Cast votes for the other candidates in comparison.
Ties are allowed. If you do not cast votes for a candidate, that candidate does not receive votes. -
Now we should consider if this strategy will create a linguist hell regarding the “one person one vote” rule.
In Wesberry, Justice Hugo Black held "as nearly as practicable one man's vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another's."
Reynolds vs Sims confirmed that the Equal Protection Clause requires substantially equal legislative representation for all citizens in a State regardless of where they reside.
The manor in which votes are cast and the value of one man’s vote in comparison to another’s are two different issues, so we should be ok. But are we?
No doubt detractors will try to conflate the two issues. How can we navigate the minefield? Lawyers, Speech, and Money?
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@gregw I think this is sensible, I would fully support it if it could be shown to stand up to formal legal scrutiny, in the sense of constitutionality. I’m not a constitutional scholar by any means, it would be advantageous to have this kind of language drafted by a competent team of constitutional lawyers if possible (if it wasn’t already). My concern is the same as before, that if it’s not very carefully approached, it could lead to rulings that become very prohibitive to reform efforts. The less possibility of any kind of constitutional challenge, the (very much) better.
