this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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The ballot example is bad, but I definitely think this is an improvement on the current system.
As with every system; someone will eventually find flaws and then it'll need updated. Which is how democratic countries should work.
If someone tells you the system is good enough already, you can guarantee they benefit from some inequality.
We've already found the flaws in RCV and STV.
Ranked Choice has some serious flaws.
The first and strangest is the monotonicity criterion.
Ranked Choice is the only system that fails it. What it means is that you can actually improve a candidate's chance of winning by lowering their ranking on your ballot.
Oh yeah, it also still has the spoiler effect, where a third party can fuck over an election. It's just slightly harder to achieve. But the mechanism that forces two parties remains.
It's also hard to count and thus more susceptible to malicious actors.
Some of us have been screaming about these flaws for years.
There are better options. Approval is one. It's dead simple. The ballot instructions are as such. Do you approve of the candidate, mark yes or no next to any, all or none of the candidates listed.
Candidates with the highest approval win.
Approval is immune to the Spoiler effect. It would be a direct improvement vs anything being done in the world today.
And it's still not the best system out there.
That's likely to be STAR.
Immune to the Spoiler effect and also protected vs clone candidates and such, while allowing the voter to show clear preferences.
It also is constructed in such a way that it gets around some of those "one person one vote" laws put in place by the anti-voting reform people.
Approval voting absolutely sucks. Not for any mathematical reason, it may very well give us the best results mathematically, but for psychological reasons. If you give approval to both the safe (popular) candidate and your preferred one, then you won't feel you have expressed your preference once the popular candidate wins. If you only approve your preferred candidate and an opposing (very undesirable) candidate wins, you again regret not voting tactically. In either case, you justifiably have no confidence in the results.
Also, as a candidate, how do you get people to not mark other candidates in addition to you? The answer is you don't run on your own positions but attacking opponents. Not very healthy for democracy.
I need to think more on STAR.
https://www.starvoting.org/
Gives a much better breakdown than I could.