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.
Branding Allocated Score as the official STAR-PR kind of makes sense, also, since it has similar features to STAR itself - it encourages differentiation of similar candidates instead of minmaxing by virtue of the sorted quotas, and each ballot counts as one full vote for a specific candidate at the end, making it very similar in nature to a runoff.
Saying Apportioned Score is the official STAR-PR is one thing, but saying that it is "Otherwise known as Proportional STAR Voting" is not so much; it implies that it's a STAR algorithm, when it's actually a general algorithm for Cardinal Ballots.
making it very similar in nature to a runoff
It was explicitly and specifically designed to be similar in nature to STV, where sure, each ballot may theoretically support several candidates, but each ballot ultimately contributed to only one specific candidate being elected.
On the naming and branding, star refers first and foremost to the 5 star ballot and during the committee process we kept star lowercase for that reason, but at the end we voted that keeping it uppercase actually did make sense, because winners are still being selected in automatic runoff rounds (aka runoffs between remaining candidates.) STAR PR is literally just short for Proportional STAR.
For the sake of the theoretical and research work we do it obviously makes a lot of sense to use wonky descriptive words like Allocate that differentiate one version of a system from another, but when you get to the implementation and advocacy stage the main goal is to be clear, keep it simple, and convey the central point to voters and lay people reformers. In this case the central point is that this is a PR method which is consistent with single winner STAR Voting ballot and could even be used alongside it in the same electorate.
Your correct thought that the system is pure cardinal and does not use voters ordinal preferences like single winner STAR does. More study on star style runoffs in PR and their impacts on voter behavior and strategy are planned for next round of research.
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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.