This is good, we need more content like this. We need to also point out how this voting system goes beyond any other in encouraging a broader view of politics among both politicians and voters, while maintaining majority rule, and encouraging maximization of voter freedom. Politicians would be able to gain a competitive edge by reaching out to their staunches opponents so long as it didn't alienate other voters, because moving from a 0 to a 1 worth as much to a candidate as moving from a 4 to a 5. Voters would have reason to pay attention and consider their relative desire for each candidate, knowing that they can indicate their full and complete support for their favorite candidates, but they can also indicate preferences among less favored candidates. This allows them to impact the race even if their favorite candidates can't win, while still showing the strength of those candidates support, it also allows them to indicate what they want politicians to do/focus on, even when they lose. They, and politicians, can see the true strength of various positions based on the scores of various candidates. That cross ideology engagement is a vital advantage of any Score based voting system, and particularly STAR voting.
Every issue becomes a shade of grey. A system that opens the field up beyond a duopoly mitigates the tribalistic us-vs-them mentality and hopefully the way media covers the issues. Too often the media covers the circus over the policy. Hopefully with the open field of candidates you'll have much more time devoted for nuanced policy debate.
Been advocating for this system since I learned of it. We need more videos comparing this to other systems. Also how can people help get this implemented?
Thanks Vincent. Another member of the team has created some videos to go along. Have you checked out this one? ua-cam.com/video/-4FXLQoLDBA/v-deo.html . We are getting set to launch two local campaigns in Oregon (equal.vote/reform) and welcome folks elsewhere who want to kick things off in their own locales. Thanks for spreading the word!
The debate was a conversation (off stage) between Mark Frohnmayer, founder of the Equal Vote Coalition, Clay Shentrup, co-founder of the Center for Election Science, and Rob Richie, founder of FairVote. These three individuals and groups were advocating for 3 voting methods (Approval, Score, and Ranked Choice,) at the Equal Vote Coalition's conference on voting methods at University of Oregon in 2014. The gist of it was that a preference style ballot is more strategy resistant, and that a score ballot is more accurate. (Both claims have been shown to have merit.) The factions have long debated which is more important, and how likely various scenarios would actually be in practice. The conversation sparked a realization from Frohnmayer and Shentrup that a score ballot contains the preference data as well as the level of support, and that you could count the ballot both ways, first totaling the scores, and then adding in a runoff using the preferences. This would accomplish the best of both worlds. That idea was the the seed for STAR Voting, and the theory has since been confirmed in every analysis to date.
Tbh it would be a very bad idea to do that since you can’t expect the general public to know about every single issue, that’s why we have a republic. Candidates do this because they have alternative motives like money. If we get corporate money out of politics and make it illegal to profit off of your bills like using stocks for example we would have much more honest candidates.
@@seangreenfield9791 The point isn't to force a public vote on every issue, but for the public to have a say. Solutions for this already exist: the liquid democracy model (where you delegate your vote to someone who you think knows more than you on a topic) and the Swiss model (representative democracy, but if any law gets enough signatures/votes from the public, it can be struck down).
I think the simplicity of STAR is OK at best. Score/Range would be much easier to explain to clueless people and more likely to be implemented. It may not be better, but it is very close.
For most people, if they can understand how score works, they don't need to know anything more, because if they are as clueless as you suggest, they won't compare about the runoff.
@Craig Bowers Yeah, I don't understand how combining score voting and instant run off voting is simpler than score voting or instant run off voting tbh
@@johnriverdavis3497 he didn’t put just score/range up, but he did put Approval voting up which is a simple form of score voting. And he gave them at one Super! (>> Good)
I'm the 1st president of the west coast here in Cascadia... If I am more educated than all of you across all topics give me one reason that you should get to vote on anything! Other than your ego!
Is there a place to access the spreadsheet shown at 2:20? That would be great to really learn about each voting method and the metrics by which we should judge them
Contrary to popular belief, Ralph Nader did not spoil the 2000 election, nor did Jill Stein spoil 2016. George W. Bush got more votes from registered Democrats in 2000 than Ralph Nader got in total. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory over Donald Trump in the popular vote was double Jill Stein‘s entire national total.
That is false lol. Just because the big two candidates were that much more popular than the "spoilers" doesn't change the fact that the margin of victory (537 votes in Florida in 2000 and
Have you looked at Rank then Automatic Runoff? As in you have to rank the candidates, then score them as normal then do runoff? I wonder if that would prevent people having polar ballots… but I don’t know if this satisfies favorite betrayal criterion
I can already see an unsatisfactory aspect of strategic voting here. I would be incentivized to give 5s to my favorite candidates and 0s to everyone else out of fear that my partial support to a less liked candidate could make them beat my favorite candidate. You point out that the runoff stage serves to ward against this but that is only true if all block voters feel the same (and largely they do) but the single voter feels his opinion is unique and so would still likely give 5s to all of the candidates he likes not realizing this will bring back the issues that plagued the old system. I think ranking is superior to rating because of this.
Exactly. Say there are three candidates: one candidate you love, one that you dislike and one you just completely utterly loathe. There is a good chance that you don't want to risk giving the candidate you dislike any less than 5 points, because that would increase the chance of the worst candidate winning, which means that now you didn't show any preference between the two candidates you voted for, even though you have a clear preference. So now you are still voting for the lesser of two evils. Yes, you also vote for the candidate you love, but you still have to make the strategic choice of giving your lesser-of-two-evils candidate more points, and thus decreasing the chance of your favorite candidate winning or giving them less votes and thus increasing the chance of the worst candidate winning.
At least with Instant Run-off Voting you can show a clear preference for your favorite candidate, without (in most cases) increasing the chance of the worst candidate winning. Yes I recognize that IRV in some cases requires strategic voting as well, but that seems to be restricted to very specific cases, namely the cases where you support a candidate who is polling roughly just as good as at least two other candidates, and the supporters of your second favorite candidate must be split on who they pick as a second candidate. Only in those specific cases does IRV require strategic voting, while STAR requires it every election.
@@SickRedApple IRV is estimated to be non-monotonous between 5 and 14% of the time, and because ballots are usually not released it's impossible to see when this happens in real elections. "A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot)." 5-14% figures: www.rangevoting.org/Monotone.html#summ Monotonicity definition from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion?wprov=sfla1
I have not seen an analysis that shows how to distinguish harmful inequality from harmless inequality. A lack of such an analysis should make you fear all systems that don't provide equality.
BTW in this comment you used he/him for someone of non important or distinct gender. We already have a pronoun for these people and it's they/them. Just to let you know.
Let me get this straight... regardless of whether you have 3 candicates or many... If a lot of voters (say 45 %) thinks candidate A is best, another lot thinks candidate B is best, and almost everybody thinks candidate C is a great second best.... the system you suggest still makes candidate C lose and A or B win?
That would depend on the details of the election. A candidate needs to have broad support and also be preferred by a majority of voters to win in STAR Voting. Is the B + A coalition bigger or is the B + C coalition bigger in your example? Do A voters prefer B or C? Do C voters prefer B or A?
What is my incentive against only using 5-star and 0-star votes? Seems like that would in many situations be strategically preferable because it maximizes the chance of one of my okay+ candidates qualifying for the run-off vote.
With STAR Voting the incentive is to show you preference order. That ensures that your vote will go to the finalist you prefer whether or not your favorite can win. This is one of the main advantages over basic Score Voting, which does have the strategic incentive you describe. The runoff is the key to incentivizing honest voting and insuring that even minority voters have their vote count.
@@equalvote Thanks for the response. I find it arbitrary that I would have to sacrifice 1/5 points worth of pre-run-off voting power in exchange for the ability to rank my favourite two candidates on the off-chance that those specific two make it to the run-off. The voter has to consider whether giving up 1/5 points is worth it. That decision depends on the chance that that pair of candidates make it to the run-off. (0%=definitely not worth it, 100% = definitely worth it). That chance is based on other people's votes, so this introduces some amount of strategic voting. This problem arises because the voter has to encode their rank information and their score information into the same finite array of integers. This compression distorts their intent. The longer the range of possible scores, the smaller this problem becomes, because you can encode more information. If the voters could use floating points like 0, 0.0001, 2, 3, 4, 4.9999, 5 instead of only integer values, they wouldn't need to give up any pre-run-off voting power to be able to rank. There is no compression loss because floating points can encode an infinite amount of information. Anyway, I just wanted to ask, have you considered other ranges such as 0 - 10? I would personally be twice as comfortable voting 10 for Jorgensen and 9 for Trump, than I would be voting 5 for Jorgensen and 4 for Trump.
@@JesseBusman1996 on the chart comparing the VSE performance they test STAR5 (as in 0-5), STAR6,…STAR9. STAR9 performed the best. I imagine STARN+1 would perform better with diminishing margins
What do you think of modifying the first counting step, by dividing the scores by total scoring points of that voter? This way every vote has the same weight. In the current proposal, you can vote strategically to prevent one or a few candidates, by ging the rest of the candidates all 5 stars.
You can take that strategic approach, and it might work to keep them out of the runoff round. Or it might not. And if you gave both finalists 5 stars, you've effectively not shown up to vote. And while maybe you can on occasion get your best outcome with strategy, tests have shown that tactical voting tends to backfire in STAR. Contrast that with Plurality, where every election necessitates tactical voting. A vote for third party is a vote for the opposition. I can't say what weighting each ballot to a net 1 point might do to the system. Maybe better, maybe worse, maybe nothing. I'd have to let the election scientists answer that. I can say that it will make the system a little more complicated, and by a little, 3/4 of voters will denounce it as quantum physics + witchcraft. If you've watched states try to implement IRV, you'll have noticed that it has to be dead simple or they won't go for it.
so you're saying that i can vote highly for a candidate that is unlikely to beat the candidate I want to get in that way in the run off my preferred candidate is more likely to win?
You would be best served by giving your preferred choice a 5 and your worst a 0. For the rest of them, whether any strategy enters in or you score them sincerely might depend on the election, but it seems like those first two scores are always a given.
I think instead of tallying the score in the first round you should average it. This makes it so canidates who are more poalrizing do worse then those who are less polarizing. For example getting a lot of 5's and 0's is worse than getting all 3's which is exactly what we should want for a country. Canidates who are more universally liked, as opposed to canidates who are admired or hated. Universal canidates unite a country while canidates who are admired or hated divide the country.
How is this a new method? It seemed the one obvious voting system to me from when YT changed from score to thumbs up/down and I wondered why they didn't change to automatic runstuff instead.
The point of star system is to have range voting (where you give an score to some candidate or video or song and the one with best average win) and try to make people at range voting not give bullet voting. Bullet voting means giving max score to best candidate and worst score to everyone else, or best score to everyone at your side and worst score to everyone else. Bullet voting is literally approval system and youtube thumb up/down voting system is also approval system, there is no reason to add some sort of automatic runoff because it wont fix bullet voting. Also star voting assuming you are trying to find the best candidate, at youtube videos they try to find how good a video is not the bast, to use ATAR (approval system then instant runoff) to youtube, it would require youtube to have some page where it tells what the best youtube video is. Also approval system is worse than range voting even at a two candidates election, STAR voting using approval system to find the winner between the top 2 range voter candidates is a compromise to try to make sure people don't bullet vote.
Why are blank ratings counted as 0 instead of just not counting? Isn't there a difference between having no opinion on a candidate and hating that candidate?
Semantically, yes. But in terms of the calculations, 0 would award them no points in the cumulative total, and 1-5 will always be "preferred more" than 0, so it works out to the same thing.
You can implement blanks, but then there are other issues you need to consider like when a candidate receives a lot of blanks and a lot of 5's. There's ways around it but makes the system more complex. But since most people are risk averse and feel negatively about candidates they don't know anything about, defaulting to zero is the correct choice. It also speeds up the voting process by requiring less explicit information.
Do you have more detail about how it prevents bullet voting (giving someone either the highest possible score or giving the lowest possible score all the time.)? The other thing is, if you can score a candidate 1-5, what happens if they're more than 5 candidates?
Regarding more than 5 candidates: it's a scoring system first (i.e., scores are independent for each candidate), and a ranking system second. You can give multiple candidates the same score and it will be counted unless the two you ended up giving the same score to ended up in the top 2.
Ordinary score voting does incentivize bullet voting and essentially devolves into Approval voting. The key with STAR is the runoff round. If you strategically gave both the finalists a 5, or both a 0, you've basically chosen to not show up to vote in the final round. Now if you sincerely felt both deserved that score, it follows that you don't have a huge preference between the two, so it's not a huge deal to you either way. But if you inwardly think one is a 5 and the other a 2, but gave both 5s, your strategy has backfired.
Simplicity because a lot of people find it complicated to have to sort all the candidates into an order of preference. I'm not sure exactly what they mean by equality, but possibly the fact that IRV can lead to popular candidates being eliminated early on due to not having many first choice votes but who would have done very well with 2nd and 3rd choice votes.
Equality of IRV is poor because there's no way to cancel out someone's ballot with yours. Some ballots matter more than others, i.e., people who favor a frontrunner candidate get an advantage. In fact, most information in the ballots is discarded/unused, especially for people who favor the frontrunners. It's as unequal as you can get.
@@1ucasvb Can you explain what you mean by "cancel out?" If I'm understanding the term right, that's saying "my vote for Biden cancels out your vote for Trump," which is only true in a head-to-head two-party race...when isn't the point to NOT have that as our system? And in what way does a voter for a frontrunner have an advantage? How would one ballot matter more than others?
@@wolfpackjew I am citing a complaint I've often heard. I don't find it particularly complicated, but apparently many do. Perhaps not the same people who rank 23 Marvel movies in a facebook post.
While I do like this system, rating the simplicity as "good" is just wrong. I needed to go to your website and actually read through the description there in order to properly understand how it works. If you are rating instant runoff as poor, then how does a system with runoff as one of multiple steps rate any better? Mind, even with a simplicity of poor it's still the best system of those I've compared it to, but it's important to acknowledge faults otherwise critics will use that to shoot down the entire system.
It's always only 2 steps, instead of potentially _n_ steps with RCV. Also, summarizing it as "count all the points, then count all the preferred ones" is a lot simpler than "eliminate the least favoured candidate; then, consider their second choice and add them to the remaining people's tallies; see if any one has reached above 50%; if, not, keep repeating the process until someone has". Mind you, this whole 4-day election extravaganza with news channels reporting individual counties live is also not possible with RCV because it's not precinct summable.
@@tstcikhthys It's not about how simple it is to describe the math/process for selecting the candidate, but about how simple it is for the voter to understand. Ranked choice is "Eliminate the person with the least votes, distribute their votes, repeat." If the person I like doesn't get that many votes, my vote just moves to the next one. It's only one type of action. Compare that to STAR where I can't even remember how exactly it works because I watched this video months ago.
@@tamwin5 Well your summary is missing the "keep repeating until someone has more than 50% of the vote" part, which is not a part of the plurality voting everyone is familiar with. And while judging whether something is simple or not will be subjective, I can tell you that at first it took me about an hour to figure out how RCV actually works, looking at various examples and such; STAR took about a minute. And my background is engineering, mind you.
@@tamwin5 Oh and I almost forgot, you're going to have to explain to voters why they can't just count the ballots at the county level and add up the results, or why they can't watch that cumulative process on TV.
@tamwin5 Australians have used IRV for over a century and if you ask any person in the street they wouldn't be able to explain how it works. They still have to make videos telling people how to use the system because they keep voting for the mainstream party first to "not throw away their vote", even though the method is supposed to address this. (In any case, it doesn't.)
The base STAR Voting system is for single-winner offices. STAR is Score Then Automatic Runoff. There are several different PR systems that use the same style of ballot. Checkout Reweighted Range Voting or our own twist on that concept at equal.vote/pr
The problem is not the voting per se but the fact that most people get all their information from television. Television controls the voting process and television has owners with an agenda
I have not seen an analysis that shows how to distinguish harmful inequality from harmless inequality. A lack of such an analysis should make you fear all systems that don't provide equality.
@@williamwaugh8670 let me correct that so someone else dont detour the topic into misspellings. The equality or inequality is merely a symptom of a much bigger problem: Monetary policy. If a sector of the community charge a tax on the use of money you will soon have monopolization, social engineering and selected education.
@@se7ensnakes Some localities have ballot initiatives. Voters there can implement equality, over against the wishes of capital. They did it in Fargo and St. Louis.
this is not simple. You need to decide not only who you prefer but need to have enough of an opinion to decide between if they are a 3,4,5. Also you are punishing people who have a low opinion on all candidates but still have preferences.
This is as simple as it gets without being Plurality. If a voter really doesn't care to express a preference, they don't have to. They can just go all 5s and 0s the whole way. Those who do care can express a more nuanced opinion about each candidate. I would further argue in favor of incentivizing voters to have an opinion. I'm not willing to coddle those whose first thought about the candidates is seeing on election day which ones have an R or D next to their name.
You will not find a system of any kind that isn't vulnerable to some level of strategic voting. The key is to not dismiss it as a binary all-or-nothing but rather to consider the various types of strategic voting and the extent to which the system is prone to them. Plurality is basically wearing no armor. IRV at least has some chain mail. STAR is fully decked out in plate. Yeah, you can get a spear through an eye slit, but it's a lot harder. More specifically, some of the vulnerabilities: * Spoiler effect - Plurality is broken, IRV and STAR are good. * Clone effect - Plurality is broken, IRV does pretty good (even if it gets the right answer with the wrong arithmetic), STAR does much better. * Center Squeeze - Plurality is broken, IRV is broken, STAR is good.
@@danejohannescaldwell7999 "You will not find a system of any kind that isn't vulnerable to some level of strategic voting." Well, the Condorcet-based methods make strategic voting much harder. If there _is_ a Condorcet winner, strategic voting is useless. If not, it still requires more detailed knowledge of how people are voting in advance.
STAR is better than RCV and approval, and unlike RCV, both STAR and approval would challenge the status quo. RCV only upgrades a two-party system into a two-faction system. It's literally what the method does with the ballots, built into the algorithm's assumptions, and it is what it has created everywhere it's been implemented long enough (e.g. Australia).
@@1ucasvb Score Then Automatic Runoff ... nice system, horrible acronym ... makes it sound like you're voting for American Idol or something like that ... www.starvoting.us
@@johnriverdavis3497 Approval is pretty simple and remarkably resilient to a lot of vulnerabilities. I'd go for it over Plurality for sure. That said, I think STAR is an improvement over Approval in that it lets voters be more expressive about their candidates. I'm concerned that both will have a hard time with constitutional challenges, though, given the argument that could be made about one ballot being worth more than another. I disagree, but courts might see it different.
What I really want to know: who's pushing STAR so hard? This video with its favorable criteria, Wikipedia articles that have fanboy text all over them... there is either some cultish grass-roots shit going on or someone put money into this. The voting method might or might not be superior but I don't like how it's pushed on us.
The organization behind STAR Voting is the Equal Vote Coalition. It's a small 501c3 non-profit based out of Eugene, OR, with one employee. Campaigns are run though their own petition committees and campaign committees, as is required by campaign finance law. In general the STAR Voting projects are mostly volunteers run, with most of our resources donated. We are still hoping to secure more solid funding. When STAR Voting was first invented 5 years ago it was initially written off by most people, but when it topped the charts in a study on Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE) from the Center for Election Science (CES) that turned some heads. The study was run by Jameson Quinn, who is highly respected in the field, and who now has his PhD in Statistics from Harvard. The Center for Election Science is advocating Approval Voting, another reform, so STAR topping the charts was not the outcome they were looking for there. We are not affiliated or responsible for the Wikipedia page on STAR, but we have found the election reform content there to be unbiased and high quality. That said many of the people who take the deep dive come out the other side enthusiastic and inspired. That's what it is going to take to get STAR passed locally, statewide, and nationally, so if people do come across as overzealous please take it with a grain of salt and do your own due diligence. It's worth it!
I have not seen an analysis that shows how to distinguish harmful inequality from harmless inequality. A lack of such an analysis should make you fear all systems that don't provide equality.
@@tstcikhthys the irony. You see me as part of the problem. I see you as part of the problem. Don't you see how implying that your solution is the only solution comes across as cultish and either uninformed or disingenuous? There are so many ranked choice voting methods and it's mathematically proven that the perfect one does not exist. So what are you saying with your last sentence, exactly?
This is good, we need more content like this. We need to also point out how this voting system goes beyond any other in encouraging a broader view of politics among both politicians and voters, while maintaining majority rule, and encouraging maximization of voter freedom. Politicians would be able to gain a competitive edge by reaching out to their staunches opponents so long as it didn't alienate other voters, because moving from a 0 to a 1 worth as much to a candidate as moving from a 4 to a 5. Voters would have reason to pay attention and consider their relative desire for each candidate, knowing that they can indicate their full and complete support for their favorite candidates, but they can also indicate preferences among less favored candidates. This allows them to impact the race even if their favorite candidates can't win, while still showing the strength of those candidates support, it also allows them to indicate what they want politicians to do/focus on, even when they lose. They, and politicians, can see the true strength of various positions based on the scores of various candidates. That cross ideology engagement is a vital advantage of any Score based voting system, and particularly STAR voting.
Every issue becomes a shade of grey. A system that opens the field up beyond a duopoly mitigates the tribalistic us-vs-them mentality and hopefully the way media covers the issues. Too often the media covers the circus over the policy. Hopefully with the open field of candidates you'll have much more time devoted for nuanced policy debate.
Our bad systems are infuriating. I really like this one.
Been advocating for this system since I learned of it. We need more videos comparing this to other systems. Also how can people help get this implemented?
Thanks Vincent. Another member of the team has created some videos to go along. Have you checked out this one? ua-cam.com/video/-4FXLQoLDBA/v-deo.html . We are getting set to launch two local campaigns in Oregon (equal.vote/reform) and welcome folks elsewhere who want to kick things off in their own locales. Thanks for spreading the word!
I just voted for this in lane county. Good luck!
This is pretty great. I hope this becomes widely adopted in the future.
I am responsible for the 270th like, and I feel like that should mean we implement this in the US now
4:15 where can I find this debate??
The debate was a conversation (off stage) between Mark Frohnmayer, founder of the Equal Vote Coalition, Clay Shentrup, co-founder of the Center for Election Science, and Rob Richie, founder of FairVote. These three individuals and groups were advocating for 3 voting methods (Approval, Score, and Ranked Choice,) at the Equal Vote Coalition's conference on voting methods at University of Oregon in 2014.
The gist of it was that a preference style ballot is more strategy resistant, and that a score ballot is more accurate. (Both claims have been shown to have merit.) The factions have long debated which is more important, and how likely various scenarios would actually be in practice. The conversation sparked a realization from Frohnmayer and Shentrup that a score ballot contains the preference data as well as the level of support, and that you could count the ballot both ways, first totaling the scores, and then adding in a runoff using the preferences. This would accomplish the best of both worlds. That idea was the the seed for STAR Voting, and the theory has since been confirmed in every analysis to date.
Since cannidates often say one thing and do another, We need ballots that let us vote on general policies more (beyond ballot measures)
Tbh it would be a very bad idea to do that since you can’t expect the general public to know about every single issue, that’s why we have a republic. Candidates do this because they have alternative motives like money. If we get corporate money out of politics and make it illegal to profit off of your bills like using stocks for example we would have much more honest candidates.
@@seangreenfield9791 The point isn't to force a public vote on every issue, but for the public to have a say. Solutions for this already exist: the liquid democracy model (where you delegate your vote to someone who you think knows more than you on a topic) and the Swiss model (representative democracy, but if any law gets enough signatures/votes from the public, it can be struck down).
I think the simplicity of STAR is OK at best.
Score/Range would be much easier to explain to clueless people and more likely to be implemented.
It may not be better, but it is very close.
For most people, if they can understand how score works, they don't need to know anything more, because if they are as clueless as you suggest, they won't compare about the runoff.
@Craig Bowers Yeah, I don't understand how combining score voting and instant run off voting is simpler than score voting or instant run off voting tbh
@Craig Bowers IRV is pretty complicated. If you have 5+ candidates, tracing to the final outcome is tough
@@johnriverdavis3497 he didn’t put just score/range up, but he did put Approval voting up which is a simple form of score voting. And he gave them at one Super! (>> Good)
no, Irv is much more confusing to people, star is clean af@Craig Bowers
I'm the 1st president of the west coast here in Cascadia... If I am more educated than all of you across all topics give me one reason that you should get to vote on anything! Other than your ego!
Is there a place to access the spreadsheet shown at 2:20? That would be great to really learn about each voting method and the metrics by which we should judge them
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems
Looks like some Wikipedia page
Contrary to popular belief, Ralph Nader did not spoil the 2000 election, nor did Jill Stein spoil 2016. George W. Bush got more votes from registered Democrats in 2000 than Ralph Nader got in total. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory over Donald Trump in the popular vote was double Jill Stein‘s entire national total.
And Gore got more votes and let the SC decide the election
That is false lol. Just because the big two candidates were that much more popular than the "spoilers" doesn't change the fact that the margin of victory (537 votes in Florida in 2000 and
Have you looked at Rank then Automatic Runoff? As in you have to rank the candidates, then score them as normal then do runoff? I wonder if that would prevent people having polar ballots… but I don’t know if this satisfies favorite betrayal criterion
I can already see an unsatisfactory aspect of strategic voting here. I would be incentivized to give 5s to my favorite candidates and 0s to everyone else out of fear that my partial support to a less liked candidate could make them beat my favorite candidate. You point out that the runoff stage serves to ward against this but that is only true if all block voters feel the same (and largely they do) but the single voter feels his opinion is unique and so would still likely give 5s to all of the candidates he likes not realizing this will bring back the issues that plagued the old system. I think ranking is superior to rating because of this.
Exactly. Say there are three candidates: one candidate you love, one that you dislike and one you just completely utterly loathe. There is a good chance that you don't want to risk giving the candidate you dislike any less than 5 points, because that would increase the chance of the worst candidate winning, which means that now you didn't show any preference between the two candidates you voted for, even though you have a clear preference.
So now you are still voting for the lesser of two evils. Yes, you also vote for the candidate you love, but you still have to make the strategic choice of giving your lesser-of-two-evils candidate more points, and thus decreasing the chance of your favorite candidate winning or giving them less votes and thus increasing the chance of the worst candidate winning.
At least with Instant Run-off Voting you can show a clear preference for your favorite candidate, without (in most cases) increasing the chance of the worst candidate winning.
Yes I recognize that IRV in some cases requires strategic voting as well, but that seems to be restricted to very specific cases, namely the cases where you support a candidate who is polling roughly just as good as at least two other candidates, and the supporters of your second favorite candidate must be split on who they pick as a second candidate.
Only in those specific cases does IRV require strategic voting, while STAR requires it every election.
@@SickRedApple IRV is estimated to be non-monotonous between 5 and 14% of the time, and because ballots are usually not released it's impossible to see when this happens in real elections.
"A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot)."
5-14% figures: www.rangevoting.org/Monotone.html#summ
Monotonicity definition from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion?wprov=sfla1
I have not seen an analysis that shows how to distinguish harmful inequality from harmless inequality. A lack of such an analysis should make you fear all systems that don't provide equality.
BTW in this comment you used he/him for someone of non important or distinct gender. We already have a pronoun for these people and it's they/them.
Just to let you know.
Let me get this straight... regardless of whether you have 3 candicates or many... If a lot of voters (say 45 %) thinks candidate A is best, another lot thinks candidate B is best, and almost everybody thinks candidate C is a great second best.... the system you suggest still makes candidate C lose and A or B win?
That would depend on the details of the election. A candidate needs to have broad support and also be preferred by a majority of voters to win in STAR Voting.
Is the B + A coalition bigger or is the B + C coalition bigger in your example? Do A voters prefer B or C? Do C voters prefer B or A?
What is my incentive against only using 5-star and 0-star votes? Seems like that would in many situations be strategically preferable because it maximizes the chance of one of my okay+ candidates qualifying for the run-off vote.
With STAR Voting the incentive is to show you preference order. That ensures that your vote will go to the finalist you prefer whether or not your favorite can win.
This is one of the main advantages over basic Score Voting, which does have the strategic incentive you describe. The runoff is the key to incentivizing honest voting and insuring that even minority voters have their vote count.
@@equalvote Thanks for the response.
I find it arbitrary that I would have to sacrifice 1/5 points worth of pre-run-off voting power in exchange for the ability to rank my favourite two candidates on the off-chance that those specific two make it to the run-off. The voter has to consider whether giving up 1/5 points is worth it. That decision depends on the chance that that pair of candidates make it to the run-off. (0%=definitely not worth it, 100% = definitely worth it). That chance is based on other people's votes, so this introduces some amount of strategic voting.
This problem arises because the voter has to encode their rank information and their score information into the same finite array of integers. This compression distorts their intent.
The longer the range of possible scores, the smaller this problem becomes, because you can encode more information. If the voters could use floating points like 0, 0.0001, 2, 3, 4, 4.9999, 5 instead of only integer values, they wouldn't need to give up any pre-run-off voting power to be able to rank. There is no compression loss because floating points can encode an infinite amount of information.
Anyway, I just wanted to ask, have you considered other ranges such as 0 - 10? I would personally be twice as comfortable voting 10 for Jorgensen and 9 for Trump, than I would be voting 5 for Jorgensen and 4 for Trump.
@@JesseBusman1996 on the chart comparing the VSE performance they test STAR5 (as in 0-5), STAR6,…STAR9. STAR9 performed the best. I imagine STARN+1 would perform better with diminishing margins
What do you think of modifying the first counting step, by dividing the scores by total scoring points of that voter? This way every vote has the same weight. In the current proposal, you can vote strategically to prevent one or a few candidates, by ging the rest of the candidates all 5 stars.
You can take that strategic approach, and it might work to keep them out of the runoff round. Or it might not. And if you gave both finalists 5 stars, you've effectively not shown up to vote. And while maybe you can on occasion get your best outcome with strategy, tests have shown that tactical voting tends to backfire in STAR.
Contrast that with Plurality, where every election necessitates tactical voting. A vote for third party is a vote for the opposition.
I can't say what weighting each ballot to a net 1 point might do to the system. Maybe better, maybe worse, maybe nothing. I'd have to let the election scientists answer that. I can say that it will make the system a little more complicated, and by a little, 3/4 of voters will denounce it as quantum physics + witchcraft. If you've watched states try to implement IRV, you'll have noticed that it has to be dead simple or they won't go for it.
so you're saying that i can vote highly for a candidate that is unlikely to beat the candidate I want to get in that way in the run off my preferred candidate is more likely to win?
@@SeanWaters1120 did i imply it was a flaw?
Go Oregon!
Imagine my preferred choice loses because I ranked them a 4 instead of a 5. Infuriating.
Well. If you are worried about that just give them a 5.
You would be best served by giving your preferred choice a 5 and your worst a 0. For the rest of them, whether any strategy enters in or you score them sincerely might depend on the election, but it seems like those first two scores are always a given.
I think instead of tallying the score in the first round you should average it. This makes it so canidates who are more poalrizing do worse then those who are less polarizing. For example getting a lot of 5's and 0's is worse than getting all 3's which is exactly what we should want for a country. Canidates who are more universally liked, as opposed to canidates who are admired or hated. Universal canidates unite a country while canidates who are admired or hated divide the country.
Binomial voting, SNTV vote with multi-member constituencies, and Welsh AMS are worse than FPTP IMO
1:51 and 2:20 oh, my, quite a few voting methods
Does this system have favorite betrayal?
How is this a new method? It seemed the one obvious voting system to me from when YT changed from score to thumbs up/down and I wondered why they didn't change to automatic runstuff instead.
The point of star system is to have range voting (where you give an score to some candidate or video or song and the one with best average win) and try to make people at range voting not give bullet voting. Bullet voting means giving max score to best candidate and worst score to everyone else, or best score to everyone at your side and worst score to everyone else.
Bullet voting is literally approval system and youtube thumb up/down voting system is also approval system, there is no reason to add some sort of automatic runoff because it wont fix bullet voting. Also star voting assuming you are trying to find the best candidate, at youtube videos they try to find how good a video is not the bast, to use ATAR (approval system then instant runoff) to youtube, it would require youtube to have some page where it tells what the best youtube video is.
Also approval system is worse than range voting even at a two candidates election, STAR voting using approval system to find the winner between the top 2 range voter candidates is a compromise to try to make sure people don't bullet vote.
Why are blank ratings counted as 0 instead of just not counting? Isn't there a difference between having no opinion on a candidate and hating that candidate?
Semantically, yes. But in terms of the calculations, 0 would award them no points in the cumulative total, and 1-5 will always be "preferred more" than 0, so it works out to the same thing.
You can implement blanks, but then there are other issues you need to consider like when a candidate receives a lot of blanks and a lot of 5's. There's ways around it but makes the system more complex. But since most people are risk averse and feel negatively about candidates they don't know anything about, defaulting to zero is the correct choice. It also speeds up the voting process by requiring less explicit information.
Do you have more detail about how it prevents bullet voting (giving someone either the highest possible score or giving the lowest possible score all the time.)?
The other thing is, if you can score a candidate 1-5, what happens if they're more than 5 candidates?
They give up their vote in the finals if their choice doesn't make top 2.
Regarding more than 5 candidates: it's a scoring system first (i.e., scores are independent for each candidate), and a ranking system second. You can give multiple candidates the same score and it will be counted unless the two you ended up giving the same score to ended up in the top 2.
Ordinary score voting does incentivize bullet voting and essentially devolves into Approval voting. The key with STAR is the runoff round. If you strategically gave both the finalists a 5, or both a 0, you've basically chosen to not show up to vote in the final round. Now if you sincerely felt both deserved that score, it follows that you don't have a huge preference between the two, so it's not a huge deal to you either way. But if you inwardly think one is a 5 and the other a 2, but gave both 5s, your strategy has backfired.
What makes the equality and simplicity of IRV poor?
Simplicity because a lot of people find it complicated to have to sort all the candidates into an order of preference.
I'm not sure exactly what they mean by equality, but possibly the fact that IRV can lead to popular candidates being eliminated early on due to not having many first choice votes but who would have done very well with 2nd and 3rd choice votes.
Equality of IRV is poor because there's no way to cancel out someone's ballot with yours. Some ballots matter more than others, i.e., people who favor a frontrunner candidate get an advantage. In fact, most information in the ballots is discarded/unused, especially for people who favor the frontrunners. It's as unequal as you can get.
@@erikzoe1 How is that complicated? People can rank 23 Marvel movies in a facebook post but not 5 candidates on a paper ballot?
@@1ucasvb Can you explain what you mean by "cancel out?" If I'm understanding the term right, that's saying "my vote for Biden cancels out your vote for Trump," which is only true in a head-to-head two-party race...when isn't the point to NOT have that as our system? And in what way does a voter for a frontrunner have an advantage? How would one ballot matter more than others?
@@wolfpackjew I am citing a complaint I've often heard. I don't find it particularly complicated, but apparently many do. Perhaps not the same people who rank 23 Marvel movies in a facebook post.
While I do like this system, rating the simplicity as "good" is just wrong. I needed to go to your website and actually read through the description there in order to properly understand how it works. If you are rating instant runoff as poor, then how does a system with runoff as one of multiple steps rate any better? Mind, even with a simplicity of poor it's still the best system of those I've compared it to, but it's important to acknowledge faults otherwise critics will use that to shoot down the entire system.
It's always only 2 steps, instead of potentially _n_ steps with RCV. Also, summarizing it as "count all the points, then count all the preferred ones" is a lot simpler than "eliminate the least favoured candidate; then, consider their second choice and add them to the remaining people's tallies; see if any one has reached above 50%; if, not, keep repeating the process until someone has". Mind you, this whole 4-day election extravaganza with news channels reporting individual counties live is also not possible with RCV because it's not precinct summable.
@@tstcikhthys It's not about how simple it is to describe the math/process for selecting the candidate, but about how simple it is for the voter to understand. Ranked choice is "Eliminate the person with the least votes, distribute their votes, repeat." If the person I like doesn't get that many votes, my vote just moves to the next one. It's only one type of action. Compare that to STAR where I can't even remember how exactly it works because I watched this video months ago.
@@tamwin5 Well your summary is missing the "keep repeating until someone has more than 50% of the vote" part, which is not a part of the plurality voting everyone is familiar with. And while judging whether something is simple or not will be subjective, I can tell you that at first it took me about an hour to figure out how RCV actually works, looking at various examples and such; STAR took about a minute. And my background is engineering, mind you.
@@tamwin5 Oh and I almost forgot, you're going to have to explain to voters why they can't just count the ballots at the county level and add up the results, or why they can't watch that cumulative process on TV.
@tamwin5 Australians have used IRV for over a century and if you ask any person in the street they wouldn't be able to explain how it works. They still have to make videos telling people how to use the system because they keep voting for the mainstream party first to "not throw away their vote", even though the method is supposed to address this. (In any case, it doesn't.)
For this to work, social media masters need to not act as publishers.
No censorship.
A lot of assumptions being made here. People will learn to play to this test, winning through tags. There won't be a silver bullet.
So is this MMPR?
The base STAR Voting system is for single-winner offices. STAR is Score Then Automatic Runoff. There are several different PR systems that use the same style of ballot. Checkout Reweighted Range Voting or our own twist on that concept at equal.vote/pr
CHEESE
The problem is not the voting per se but the fact that most people get all their information from television. Television controls the voting process and television has owners with an agenda
I have not seen an analysis that shows how to distinguish harmful inequality from harmless inequality. A lack of such an analysis should make you fear all systems that don't provide equality.
Mass media and their focus on (and determining of) "electability" likely most easily exploits FPTP among systems
@@williamwaugh8670 let me correct that so someone else dont detour the topic into misspellings. The equality or inequality is merely a symptom of a much bigger problem: Monetary policy. If a sector of the community charge a tax on the use of money you will soon have monopolization, social engineering and selected education.
@@se7ensnakes Some localities have ballot initiatives. Voters there can implement equality, over against the wishes of capital. They did it in Fargo and St. Louis.
@@williamwaugh8670 Do you know of any candidate that is addressing the money problem?
this is not simple. You need to decide not only who you prefer but need to have enough of an opinion to decide between if they are a 3,4,5. Also you are punishing people who have a low opinion on all candidates but still have preferences.
This is as simple as it gets without being Plurality. If a voter really doesn't care to express a preference, they don't have to. They can just go all 5s and 0s the whole way. Those who do care can express a more nuanced opinion about each candidate.
I would further argue in favor of incentivizing voters to have an opinion. I'm not willing to coddle those whose first thought about the candidates is seeing on election day which ones have an R or D next to their name.
It looks like it still gives way to strategic voting.
You will not find a system of any kind that isn't vulnerable to some level of strategic voting. The key is to not dismiss it as a binary all-or-nothing but rather to consider the various types of strategic voting and the extent to which the system is prone to them. Plurality is basically wearing no armor. IRV at least has some chain mail. STAR is fully decked out in plate. Yeah, you can get a spear through an eye slit, but it's a lot harder.
More specifically, some of the vulnerabilities:
* Spoiler effect - Plurality is broken, IRV and STAR are good.
* Clone effect - Plurality is broken, IRV does pretty good (even if it gets the right answer with the wrong arithmetic), STAR does much better.
* Center Squeeze - Plurality is broken, IRV is broken, STAR is good.
@@danejohannescaldwell7999
"You will not find a system of any kind that isn't vulnerable to some level of strategic voting."
Well, the Condorcet-based methods make strategic voting much harder. If there _is_ a Condorcet winner, strategic voting is useless. If not, it still requires more detailed knowledge of how people are voting in advance.
Get rid of first past the post voting, enact ranked-choice voting or approval voting, to make every vote count.
STAR is better than RCV and approval, and unlike RCV, both STAR and approval would challenge the status quo. RCV only upgrades a two-party system into a two-faction system. It's literally what the method does with the ballots, built into the algorithm's assumptions, and it is what it has created everywhere it's been implemented long enough (e.g. Australia).
@@1ucasvb Score Then Automatic Runoff ... nice system, horrible acronym ... makes it sound like you're voting for American Idol or something like that ... www.starvoting.us
@@1ucasvb What's wrong with approval? it's certainly simpler than either of the other ones.
@@johnriverdavis3497 Approval is pretty simple and remarkably resilient to a lot of vulnerabilities. I'd go for it over Plurality for sure. That said, I think STAR is an improvement over Approval in that it lets voters be more expressive about their candidates.
I'm concerned that both will have a hard time with constitutional challenges, though, given the argument that could be made about one ballot being worth more than another. I disagree, but courts might see it different.
What I really want to know: who's pushing STAR so hard? This video with its favorable criteria, Wikipedia articles that have fanboy text all over them... there is either some cultish grass-roots shit going on or someone put money into this. The voting method might or might not be superior but I don't like how it's pushed on us.
The organization behind STAR Voting is the Equal Vote Coalition. It's a small 501c3 non-profit based out of Eugene, OR, with one employee. Campaigns are run though their own petition committees and campaign committees, as is required by campaign finance law. In general the STAR Voting projects are mostly volunteers run, with most of our resources donated. We are still hoping to secure more solid funding.
When STAR Voting was first invented 5 years ago it was initially written off by most people, but when it topped the charts in a study on Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE) from the Center for Election Science (CES) that turned some heads. The study was run by Jameson Quinn, who is highly respected in the field, and who now has his PhD in Statistics from Harvard. The Center for Election Science is advocating Approval Voting, another reform, so STAR topping the charts was not the outcome they were looking for there.
We are not affiliated or responsible for the Wikipedia page on STAR, but we have found the election reform content there to be unbiased and high quality. That said many of the people who take the deep dive come out the other side enthusiastic and inspired. That's what it is going to take to get STAR passed locally, statewide, and nationally, so if people do come across as overzealous please take it with a grain of salt and do your own due diligence. It's worth it!
What are you talking about kid? You don't like how its pushed? get the fuck outta here stupid idiot.
I have not seen an analysis that shows how to distinguish harmful inequality from harmless inequality. A lack of such an analysis should make you fear all systems that don't provide equality.
What a classic "focusing on the messenger instead of the message" situation. No wonder change doesn't happen.
@@tstcikhthys the irony. You see me as part of the problem. I see you as part of the problem. Don't you see how implying that your solution is the only solution comes across as cultish and either uninformed or disingenuous? There are so many ranked choice voting methods and it's mathematically proven that the perfect one does not exist. So what are you saying with your last sentence, exactly?
Its all about cheating!