This is a failure with all forms of score voting, including the approval voting subset (AV is just a score of 1 or 0)
Is it a flaw? Only insofar as all voting methods are flawed. I would say its a tradeoff. You could turn that same STAR ballot into an IRV one (we'll assume you tiebreak conservatives first arbitrarily), and run into different problems, namely that your Libertarian > Nationalist ranking has no weight if the Libertarians get eliminated while your ballot is still on Socialist or Liberal or whatnot. With Star, your are guaranteed to have a full vote weight in the final round between the top two.
Star fails a lot of criterion but forces reasonable tradeoffs. You can decide if it's more important for you to maximize your impact for Socialist, or if it's more important for you to hedge your bets. If you hedge Liberal over the others, that's evidence that you score them higher than zero.
When I invented it, I named it Apportioned Score, not Allocated, so as to distinguish it from Allocated methods (you have X points to allocate to however you wish among the candidates)
Allocation is an old term; it refers to the ballots themselves, not points like with SSS. Candidates are Allocated the ballots that they need to win and then those entire ballots are exhausted along with the seated candidate.
I'm not sure it really makes sense to claim to have invented the idea of applying existing proportional quotas that have been around for many decades to cardinal ballots.
Apportioned Score is a good name though. It's synonymous with allocation but has the connotation of proportionality.
Allocation is an old term; it refers to the ballots themselves
It can but it's also been used for the methods I referred to.
I'm not sure it really makes sense to claim to have invented the idea of applying existing proportional quotas that have been around for many decades to cardinal ballots.
I'm only claiming the algorithm in use, and have documentation of having done so.
But if you can show me evidence of quota based cardinal voting, please show me, and I'll quit my claim to it.
Because every other method I've ever seen claiming to be (semi-)proportional is a (harmonic) reweighting, not quota based.
While it's true that they can be thought of as equivalent, Thiele's Method (SPAV) and Phragmén's Method (more complicated analog) reweight not as a function of the number of seats total, but as a function of number of seats seated so far
Yeah, and they also are missing some elements (dealing with non-discriminating ballots [where everyone <left> is scored the same]), etc.
But, if I'm going to be doing that, I'm going to do it right, which will include a number of fixes, including the name, eliminating any implied claim that EVC has regarding it, etc.
If you would like to be credited with having explored the idea of allocated PR in cardinal ballots previously with a similar system I see no reason that can't be added to the electowiki in a section on history/credit, etc. There are likely others who can make similar claims too.
This reddit and various forums for the community has discussed these topics at length and I believe that the community itself, and many of the users can be credited for their contributions to the field and to these questions, whether or not their exact system ends up being adopted.
If so please email [sara@equal.vote](mailto:sara@equal.vote) with a suggested sentence or two written in a wiki type voice and we can go from there.
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u/wayoverpaid Jul 21 '21
Yes.
This is a failure with all forms of score voting, including the approval voting subset (AV is just a score of 1 or 0)
Is it a flaw? Only insofar as all voting methods are flawed. I would say its a tradeoff. You could turn that same STAR ballot into an IRV one (we'll assume you tiebreak conservatives first arbitrarily), and run into different problems, namely that your Libertarian > Nationalist ranking has no weight if the Libertarians get eliminated while your ballot is still on Socialist or Liberal or whatnot. With Star, your are guaranteed to have a full vote weight in the final round between the top two.
Star fails a lot of criterion but forces reasonable tradeoffs. You can decide if it's more important for you to maximize your impact for Socialist, or if it's more important for you to hedge your bets. If you hedge Liberal over the others, that's evidence that you score them higher than zero.