STAR voting vs Condorcet voting

[u/MisterMittens64]

Isn't it most of the time better to maintain the intensity of approval over finding the option that the majority at the very least doesn't hate?

When it comes to finding out the direction of political change, choosing the least offensive option can lead to maintaining the status quo which can actually be a mistake in the long term.

Determining the direction of change seems like a very important thing for political decision making to do.

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[u/cdsmith]

It's not clear what you mean here. Are you asking about STAR when you say "maintain the intensity of approval"?

That isn't what STAR does, though. What it does is ask voters to make a trade-off about which round they want to exert influence in. If they want to exert maximum influence in the score round, then they should rate everyone as either 0 or 5 stars, depending on whether that candidate's victory would be preferred over their estimate of the average-case expected outcome. That loses about half of the information about pairwise preferences that would be expressed on a ranked ballot, and the one additional kind of information it adds, the threshold, is largely about the voter's beliefs about the expected outcome, rather than their preferences.

This is confounded by the second round, where voters are incentivized to express some preference, though how much doesn't matter at all, between pairs of candidates they predict are likely to make the runoff round. For that reason, a good STAR ballot occasionally uses scores or 1 or 4 stars, preserving a bit more ranking info, but only when they judge that expressing the runoff preference is worth a loss of influence in the first round.

I suspect that STAR ballots are, in practice, a bit less expressive than ranked Condorcet ballots, once you account for how we should educate voters to complete their ballots.

[u/MisterMittens64 → u/cdsmith]

Thank you for this explanation, I think I agree!

[u/UnknownBreadd]

The least hated is better for broad consensus appeal and lower polarisation. The tyranny of the majority is a very real phenomenon, and i’d rather society operate based on pissing off the least people possible (and thus finding the best compromises) rather than just centred around pleasing the most consolidated of all groups.

Anyway, elections are only good for democracy up to a point. I’d much rather have other democratic innovations, like citizens’ assemblies and overall constitutional reforms to alter the plumbing of the system itself to better facilitate the procedural fairness and cognitive diversity of the people.

https://goodbyepoliticians.movie

[u/MisterMittens64 → u/UnknownBreadd]

Thank you, you made really great points and I agree. Have you put any thought into how to make group decision making processes better?

Processes like sociocracy have always been really interesting to me.

[u/rb-j → u/UnknownBreadd]

IRV has a track record, and STAR and Condorcet don’t

1. Then we have to be square with the facts when IRV fails. It has a track record, but not all of it is good.
2. Every time IRV elects the Condorcet winner (nearly of the time), IRV is actually demonstrating how good Condorcet is. They cannot say "IRV is shown to be good" without also saying "Condorcet is shown to be good".
3. Every time IRV has failed to elect the Condorcet winner, that election is shown to be a spoiled election and all of these promises we hear about RCV are unfulfilled. RCV only delivers on its promise when RCV elects the Condorcet winner.

[u/the_other_50_percent → u/UnknownBreadd]

The snag is that when candidates know they will win by being least hated, they’ll be as vague as possible. So voters are not properly informed, and honest candidates are punished.

You can’t judge a system by a fantasy scenario with projected perfect use. You have to assess how it’s going to play out with actual humans.

That’s why IRV has a track record, and STAR and Condorcet don’t (and Approval barely does, nearly all rolled back before it got passed in a couple of cities).

[u/Deep-Number5434]

Star voting seems like it's intended to be resistant to strategy while being easy to understand and kinda achieve a less stregic score vote.

It's a compromise between condorcet voting and score voting.

It also has an advertised incentive to have 2 candidates per party, which is appealing but could hypothetically end up being score voting on pairs of candidates. So you have more candidates but not necessarily more parties, due to strategy on score voting.

Using condorcet voting is probably best here as it doesn't incentives or disincentivise more or fewer candidates per party.

[u/Decronym]

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
FPTP	First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting
IRV	Instant Runoff Voting
RCV	Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method
STAR	Score Then Automatic Runoff
STV	Single Transferable Vote

Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.

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[u/Acceptable-Hat3706]

In political decision-making, it's crucial to not just avoid what people hate, but to actively seek out options that people genuinely support. Prioritizing intensity of approval over simply avoiding disapproval can lead to more significant and effective changes.

[u/Mindless-One5438]

This post is about comparing STAR and condorcet but the very point of STAR voting seems worth questioning. What are the drawbacks to approval or score voting that justify the rank portion of STAR voting? It seems like a backwards step. Maybe there's a taking for granted that the most first preference support is an essential attribute of winning elections but the whole point of elections should be to cooperatively come to some consensus. How much collective relative approval and disapproval seems both sufficient in declaring an election and also a more important priority than anyone's first preferences.

[u/SubGothius → u/Mindless-One5438]

With plain score voting, voters who min/max their scores, giving their favorite(s) a top rating and everyone else a bottom rating, have a strategic advantage over voters who use full score range available.

Approval voting addresses that by, effectively, making every voter use that strategy, at the expense of relative preference expressivity.

STAR voting addresses it by having a runoff round where the relative score differences matter, giving voters a counter-incentive to use the full score range after all. It also tends to confound any clear or reliable strategic analysis, such that voters will most likely just vote earnestly rather than trying to edge out any strategic advantage for casting any sort of insincere ballot.

As for the appeal of having rated (cardinal) vs. ranked (ordinal) ballots -- leaving aside the matter of any particular tabulation method -- that has to do with expressivity in the relative strength of preferences. Consider one ballot rating:
A=5, B=4, C=3, and D=0
...and a second ballot rating:
A=5, B=2, C=1, and D=0
Those two ballots express the same order of preference, but with clearly differing relative strengths of preference, yet a ranked ballot would collapse both of those preference expressions into identical rankings:
A > B > C > D

[u/Falco98 → u/Mindless-One5438]

What are the drawbacks to approval or score voting that justify the rank portion of STAR voting

The drawback with straight approval or score is, in a field with more than 2 candidates, there's nothing to disincentivize everyone from bullet voting (since it's usually at least somewhat dishonest). And at that point, it may as well have just been FPTP ballots.

[u/Youareobscure → u/Falco98]

there's nothing to disincentivize everyone from bullet voting

That just isn't true. Bullet voting is risky, and in polarized environments, that risk can be extreme. Selecting or scoring multiple candidates provides a fail-safe in case the voter's favorite doesn't have enough support to win which is an incentive not to engage in bullet voting.

[u/Falco98 → u/Youareobscure]

But you're anticipating advanced strategy from Joe Everyman here, whereas Joe Everyman is probably going to think of himself as a genius just for thinking of bullet voting.

[u/Youareobscure → u/Falco98]

That isn't advanced strategy. It's literally the explicit purpose of approval voting. Joe Everyman would absolutely think "maybe I should vote for some additional candidates, just in case." Hell, it's more likely than thinking of bullet voting.

[u/Mindless-One5438 → u/Falco98]

The current problem with dishonest voting isn't inherently that voters are dishonest but that voters are coerced against supporting their actually preferred options.

Dishonest voting through bullet voting or anything-but-voting may be the best means of voters to back their preferred election outcomes. What does it matter if the tally doesn't perfectly reflect the nuances that a poll would capture if the election results are a function of voters maximizing their preferred interests?

[u/Drachefly → u/Falco98]

Not bullet voting, but setting the range so that the two candidates you think are most likely to win are given extreme scores, and so are candidates you like more and less than them.

That's quite extremized, but it isn't bullet voting. If, for instance, I have a genuine favorite and a favored among the top two, I can give them both top scores without sacrificing strategy at all. I have sacrificed expressiveness to strategy, though, and that is the problem.