@rob said in Hello:

I know you think about candidates in absolute terms while I think relatively.

Not sure what you mean by thinking of candidates in absolute terms. I have always been emphatic that voters should score RELATIVE to the others on the ballot.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm not sure I understand your question (or what that has to do with it eliminating the negative effects of vote splitting, which to me is a completely different issue than how you resolve one particular scenario).

Proof by counter example is a perfectly rigorous method for mathematical proof. I pointed out a scenario where negative voting could not encode enough expression to resolve both vote splitting instances on the ballot. You reply by stating that Approval Voting (which I did not mention) will not encode all the information needed to resolve an issue unrelated to vote splitting.

@rob said in Hello:

The strategy is very similar to strategy in FPTP, but you've got more options.

Agreed. Vote splitting still exists but it is better than plurality voting.

@rob said in Hello:

I think it is common for voters to only have a strong opinion about a single candidate

This is what I was doubting in the last email. I would need some real evidence before I endorsed a system that baked that assumption into it.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm highly skeptical that various studies (that by necessity seek to answer very generalized questions) prove anything one way or the other, but I don't really care to debate that at this point.

I agree that it is hard to get a definitive answer. In the absense of a knowing I would stay away from restricting the expression of voters. This comes with a trade off in complexity where the spectrum is something like

plurality - Negative voting -IRV - Approval - Score - STAR

You need to be to the right of IRV to not have vote splitting and that is what I think is the most important.