@psephomancy sorry for tangent, I won't continue discussion here on this.
But quickly: you're first person to emphasize this. "Choose any" only makes sense in contrast to "choose one". I suppose indeed totally out-of-context it could be misinterpreted, and your point is valid, and it does make me less totally confident about the label. Thanks
@cfrank I thought it through deeply enough (you might find some old post about it from me from long while back), and I got enough initial reactions. Conclusion for now is: this will be a bottom-up change. The people who have invested in "Approval" are too hesitant to embrace a rebrand and aren't facing enough catastrophic rejection or something to force it. You can test for yourself that every naive lay person off the street understands SO MUCH more readily when you say "Choose any" rather than "Approval" (and that they also feel constricted about "approving" candidates rather than just voting for preferences, as in how people don't approve of lesser-evils but do vote for them)
So, I think the more people just say "Choose-any (aka Approval)" over and over, there will be a slow shift to more and more use of just "choose any" until that just becomes the norm and the main advocates embrace it too. This bottom-up approach is the best path forward IMO, but I'll be happy for anything that fixes this problem.
@sarawolk FTFY
Choose-any (aka 'Approval') is a plurality method.
@cfrank I wish I had time to program a bot to have me reply here every time anyone mentions "approval" and remind everyone to clarify as "choose-any" until we eventually shift the terminology. "Approval" is a bad name with wrong implications (we can vote our preferences whether we approve or disapprove of every candidate). "Choose-any" needs to be the term. And we need to keep at it until it becomes the norm.
(But I'm just procrastinating by replying here, I have major other life stresses to go deal with)
@kodos IRV my write-up on the website? I don't know what write-up or website you mean, I don't think I did a write-up. I shared a link to someone else's write-up though.
I would think that like with IRV in general, when a candidate is eliminated, the ballots that had that candidate first move to the next choice among the remaining candidates if the ballots marked any of them.
The simpler or not-simpler thing you mentioned makes no sense to me. No round is different from any other. Anything that uses different first round or something is less simple.
Think of it like paper ballots. You just put a ballot in the pile of whatever candidate is highest on that ballot among the remaining candidates. When you check for bottom-two, it just means the two smallest piles.
@brian-lackey I think the main point is to use this to prompt IRV advocates to look at this issue, yes. I do not have plans to spend lots of time making this happen myself though
@cfrank concerted efforts for language change absolutely works. There are lots of examples. Even in this space, "instant runoff" got rebranded "ranked-choice" in practice.
"Support Voting" is too broad, almost every voting system fits that description.
"Choose One" and "Choose Any" are so dramatically superior and clear as names, they will catch on faster than other rebranding if we just do it. "Approval Voting" is not something the general public even knows as a term really, only people in voting-reform circles still.
"Approval" is a misnomer and confusing. It does NOT ask voters whether they approve or disapprove. Voters can approve all or none and still mark some as preferred over others.
What's clearly going on is "choose any" instead of "choose one" (also, please encourage everyone to stop saying FPTP and Plurality voting, those are horrible, confusing, inaccurate names). Choose-One Voting versus Choose-Any Voting is obviously the better clearer way to describe these things.
Choose-Any Voting has ZERO information about approval, and implying wrongly that it does has all sorts of ramifications including confusing people about how to think about it.
As a transition, we could say "Choose-Any (aka Approval)" until people eventually catch on and get used to the better name.
I wish this investigation had included BTR-RCV
(side-note: don't call it BTR-IRV, that includes "runoff" twice and is less-clear as a name)
@jack-waugh if you are describing RR from FV, I once had an argument about the bullet-vote claim and score voting, and it devolved to be obvious that some people have no interest in even softening their confidence about something in light of being questioned. I don't use Twitter/X at all anymore. I think best to bring up BTR in whatever random conversations when RCV comes up. More people will bring it up when more people know it is a thing etc.
@gregw for some reason, I can't click the link to see that other post you are referencing, but I was able to look into BTR-score mentioned in various places. I agree it is fine, but it is much bigger step (less of just a tweak) to go from people assuming RCV/IRV is all there is. Given a world of naive people just thinking IRV is the only alternative, the smallest tweak from there is easier to promote. With BTR-IRV, the ballot style can stay the same.
I'm not saying BTR-IRV is ideal, I'm saying it's more practical in the context of political reality.
@cfrank yeah, after posting I went further into the electowiki link etc
But I think my key view isn't just the decency of the method but the marketing as "IRV tweak". I imagine so much more success talking to RCV advocates and saying, "hey, there's a tweak that really improves RCV, it's just doing a bottom-two runoff when eliminating candidates…" and it sounds so much more "yes and" than other ways of bringing up issues with methods in practice…
A tweak to IRV to make it a Condorcet method
I actually think this feels better than any other ranked voting method I've seen.
All the other Condorcet methods seem to me to be further from IRV, which means practically that it's harder to convince RCV advocates to be open to them.
This is such a simple, clever tweak, it's easy to bring it up to RCV advocates, and it really is just a little tweak, and expressing why it matters clears up all the confusion about what's wrong with IRV to start with…
Any issues? Is there any reason to prefer Ranked Pairs or Ranked Robin or other Condorcet methods over this IRV-tweak?
Does this IRV-tweak meet the equality criterion (being able to cancel someone else's vote)? I think maybe, I just haven't confidently figured that out.
This looks to me like it might be the most practical option of any in terms of actually getting implemented in public elections because it does better than anything else at being just improved-RCV and potentially satisfying the vast majority of RCV advocates and less argument and contention than any other option…
@toby-pereira that doesn't change my point. Blocking someone's election just because they are nobody's favorite is not a goal I support at all. Being the top favorite of anyone is not the point in itself. A candidate that is nobody's favorite and that everyone really still highly approves of is likely a good candidate to elect as long as any quota-sized blocks of voters get their favorites.
I don't like the idea of getting rid of "favorite of nobody" as an end in itself. The goal I'm describing is to elect the clear favorite of a quota-sized block. There's no goal of stopping the election of consensus non-favorite candidates, and I would oppose making design choices based on that goal.
@sarawolk I think 100% of your arguments apply to plain score voting as being preferred to STAR. If everyone is honest, plain score is better than STAR for all the reasons you express. I agree with the values and the balance you describe. However, I think all the justifications for STAR over plain score also apply to adding the first step of block-allocation based on 5-star counts over plain Allocated Score.
Do you see my point about how the runoff in STAR is a balancing factor and discouragement of strategizing in the same way as the adjustment to STAR-PR that came up here?
We don't need to discuss whether brown should win, because the argument that brown should win is also an argument for brown getting elected in single-seat elections even when the majority has a more polarizing favorite. So, again, if you accept the reasons for STAR over plain score, then all the same reasons need to be dealt with in determining the best STAR-PR instead of going with a score-PR that doesn't address what STAR was invented to address.
@k-shenefiel said in Allocated score (STAR-PR) centrist clones concern:
For a six seat election in the above example a score of 1 isn't a low score of disapproval it's a modest score of approval.
I object to the entire premise that any of these voting systems say anything about approval/disapproval. I want "approval voting" changed to "choose-any voting". Except for a system like 3-2-1 that asks about approval explicitly, all these systems of rating and ranking are relative. Voters might approve of all or none of the candidates. We can only discuss "preference".
The idea of encouraging bullet voting and not using low scores seems to me to show the whole system to be flawed rather than be a solution. It's a bad workaround at best.
The description of STAR-PR doesn't have the top-two runoff step of STAR so there's no incentive to use intermediate scores as it is.
That's a problem IMO. At the very least, this undermines the credibility of the label "STAR-PR".
Award seats to candidates that qualify for seats based on their top scores alone first. … Afterwards this would switch to Allocated Score instead of the elimination round. … [the rest of your suggestion 2]
That seems (by first impression) to be a potential real solution.
Your suggestion 3 might make mathematical sense, but I think it's too complex for public-perception to go well.
My inclination is that the check-top-scores-first and award seats by quota and then do Allocated Score… that seems optimal. It brings in a bit of later-no-harm. It makes it safe to express preferences for non-first-choice candidates. Without this top-scores-checked-first step, any block large enough to get a seat can force their favorite by bullet-voting.
The whole point of STAR vs plain score is to give the majority their wish no matter what. STAR brings a weak sort of later-no-harm which disrupts the pressure for majority to bullet-vote in plain score. Effectively, "don't worry about bullet-voting to force your favorite, we'll give it to you no matter what if you have a true majority, so you can express preferences and not worry about strategizing". And while STAR is not strictly Condorcet, it's effective enough to achieve this reduction of bullet-vote pressure.
STAR-PR needs to keep this core point. We don't want voting blocks to feel regret that they could have forced a preferred outcome by bullet-voting. Simply giving seats to any blocks with enough 5-star votes seems the answer to me.
I don't think this is inherently obviously good, just as I don't think majority-winners in single-seat elections are necessarily good (compared to consensus candidates with wider support). However, I support STAR in its majoritarian emphasis because that encourages honest preference expression. STAR-PR needs to follow the same pattern, to achieve the same overall effect.
Okay, so your "over 0.5" idea for "wrong" is contrasted with <0.5 being worse than "wrong" (in your words, "bad" is worse than "wrong" it seems). This is a confusing way to put things.
As for terminology, yes, there's a question of what it means to be proportional. I don't think "everyone is equally represented" is enough. That would mean electing everyone's least favorite is still proportional. I think proportional needs to mean something like if there's a clear block of voters enough to have a quota of a seat, that block gets to elect whoever they prefer.
IMO, Proportional Representation means that whatever blocks happen to emerge in the stats are used to elect representatives as a contrast with geographically-drawn seats. PR should give the same results as if we could identify the voting blocks and designate them as we do with geographic districts for single seats. Or at least it is in this direction.
At what value of x are AB and CC equally good?
Yes, but another question is: at what value of x can we be comfortable calling CC "proportional"? Anything less than x=1?
I think any method that elects CC for any x over 0.5 is doing PR wrong
Do you mean under 0.5?
Anyway, I do think again there's two issues: what is fair to call "proportional" and what method is good for representation, and those do not need to have the same answer.
@marcus-ogren while I recognize that there are pros and cons here, the core issue is that elect-all-acceptable-centrists is not so reasonable to call "proportional representation".
I think the weighting toward consensus candidates and PR are working toward different approaches to representation. I'm okay with saying that Allocated Score is a balance between consensus and PR. That seems more fair than saying it is PR. At least given the examples.
I'm concerned with fair and transparent presentation of what a voting method is. I think that concern is independent from discussion about how good a method is for various goals.
The extreme case of lots of clones that only got 1-star does seem still to be essentially a failure for Allocated Score, but I don't see it as realistic.