It would be great to be able to vote for every candidate in an election instead of only once and you can decide to upvote, downvote, or not vote for any candidate. This way you never “throw away” your vote and extreme/hated candidates can be downvoted so if im not a fan of any candidate but one is particularly awful I can downvote that one and not vote any I don’t like while still making my voice heard that I definitely don’t want this specific candidate
Edit: Combined Approval Voting is what I want and its used by to elect the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee and the Secretary General of the United Nations
Edit 2: You can learn about and try different voting methods in this amazing project https://ncase.me/ballot/
Have you ever heard of Ranked Choice, or Instant Runoff Voting?
I have. What i want is an improved verison of Approval Voting
I was all-in for ranked choice voting (and even started working on an app for it) until I learned that a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which is extremely counterintuitive, and a flaw that I don’t think any voting system should have.
Nicky Case wrote a fantastic explanation about how that can happen, plus exploring many other voting methods: https://ncase.me/ballot/
I still think RCV (and really anything else) would be better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, but I’d definitely prefer some type of approval, score, or STAR voting over it.
Yes. Often there are unintended results. I think another issue is that many people would have difficulty understanding the math behind it. It is not complex but it doesn’t end up with concise results sometimes and distrust in the system can certainly jilt some people as we have witnessed enough.
Approval voting is similar to this. Instead of voting for one candidate, you vote for every candidate who is acceptable to you. The winner is the candidate who is acceptable to the most voters.
Exactly, but I think Approval Voting needs a Downvote option as well, so exceptionally bad candidates can be disapproved of by a voter. So a candidate that doesn’t excite you doesn’t get the same “points” from you as a candidate that wants to be a dictator.
They wouldn’t though, right? Presumably you’d vote for the one that doesn’t excite you and not the one that wants to be a dictator…
Ranked choice voting.
Personally I prefer the idea of ranking each candidate in order of preference, ie “this is my favorite candidate, this is my second-favorite, and so on for all the candidates with enough support to be on the ballot”. I feel like it has more granularity than an upvote downvote system would have.
Wait until you learn that’s how real countries work! A Parliament gives you proportional representation based on your vote versus the proportion of the populace.
Ranked voting, as you describe, still works better but it is still a winner takes all scenario. Some cities, like NYC, already use it for their local elections because yes it makes sense.
Isn’t ranked voting a 1-5 option? I want a yes, no, abstain voting. Like how Lemmy we do up, down, no vote
Downvoting would mean that in a 2 party system one Team upvotes their guy and downvotes the other.
Ranked choice voting works better. I believe CGP grey has a cool YouTube series on the voting options. He explains it based on voting in animal kingdom.
Ranked Choice is actually (much) worse overall than the modified Score that OP is describing, even with bullet voting.
As a note, Ranked Choice still has bullet voting. About 30% of voters in a ranked choice election bullet vote.
This video goes into a deep dive about Ranked Choice (and some other systems) and talks about how Ranked Choice might actually be worse than simple plurality. (which is already pretty bad)
As a note, Ranked Choice still has bullet voting. About 30% of voters in a ranked choice election bullet vote.
I think that stat could easily be attributed to a lack of familiarity with what is, to a lot of people, a new and different method of voting. You’d be surprised how many people don’t adequately read or understand directions.
In other words, what you’re describing isn’t inherent to the system itself and it could be much worse.
I’d guess that the number of people who bullet vote will decrease as the level of education and familiarity around “new” voting systems like RCV increases.
Actually, no.
Bullet voting is just a thing people do.
Even in places that have been using versions of RCV for decades, about 30% of any given population will bullet vote.
That’s info from FairVote themselves (The main proponents of RCV, even if they’re sort of scummy in their advocacy)
Might I suggest range voting? Say there are 10 candidates on the ballot. You can give each a 1-10, 1 being most preferred. After giving 1 vote to your most preferred, you vote 2 on your second choice which gives them a half of a vote. 3rd choice is 1/3 of a vote, etc. You can also choose to not cast any fraction of a vote for a candidate. So say there’s 10 candidates on a ballot, and one of them is an orange tinted fascist; you can completely withhold any part of your vote to that candidate.
This is a long read (skip to the “conclusion” part at the end to get the gist) but I think it belongs:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mark-bray-horizontalism(if anyone has a more easy to digest introduction to horizontal governance, ideally to read rather than watch, I’d love a link!)
Cant you summarize it in your comment and apply it to the post in a way you think it belongs?
It’s a form of governance, you either want to read even just the last paragraph for yourself, or you don’t… ¯\(ツ)/¯
That sort of ranked choice voting would be great in areas where there is truly a democratic option. In Utah, there is no other party except Republicans. They have gerrymandered every district so that only republicans can have their votes counted, and it is not possible to register as anything other than republican in Utah. That’s one reason we’re so in the pockets of big oil and gas industries here - it’s all about how much money politicians can line their pocket with. But the point is - there is no way to downvote anyone. Most of us don’t even get a chance to vote here.
A slight misconception in your comment, what OP is describing is much closer to a slightly limited version of Score. Or possibly an expanded Approval.
It’s nothing like Ranked Choice.
To break things down, Ranked Choice is an Ordinal voting system. You rank candidates A then B then C.
The actual mechanics of the election are a series of First Past the Post elections all on a single ballot.
To contrast, Approval and Score are both Cardinal voting systems. You express preference for A, but that doesn’t mean anything about your preference for B. The votes per candidate are counted independently of the votes for any other candidate. This means that Cardinal voting systems are 100% immune to the spoiler effect. They’re also almost completely immune to clone candidates and other such attacks.
Ordinal systems will always fall victim to the spoiler effect, although the more complex ordinal voting systems like Ranked Choice mitigate it somewhat (while making things so much worse when it does crop up)
Sounds good thanks for clarifying.
