Yes. Score voting or approval voting would be my preference. Easier to use and even more expressive for voters.
Jokes aside, "upvoting" all the candidates I approve seems much more doable than ranking the candidates in order of merit, especially given that there are a lot of candidates running.
Yes, if you are highly strategic and acutely fear some popular candidate(s), you might give maximum scores to all candidates of which you approve to minimize loss risk. But again, great. That doesn't seem like "gaming" things to me.
With score, voters leave the ballot box feeling they were able to express their preferences and therefore have less regret about their votes. Incidentally, I feel in the long term, approval or score voting would do more to improve the satisfaction people have with voting thereby increasing participation than all of today's "get out the vote" drives have had.
IDK, I'd love to see it tried.
That would also solve the issue with polarizing candidates, since by definition you now have to care that those who would never vote for you, would at least not vote against you.
However, my election integrity concerns came to outweigh the fairness considerations. Tabulating IRV is a pain, requires computers to be feasible, and is much harder to audit.
Happily, approval voting get us most of the fairness of IRV and greatly improves election integrity over both FPTP and IRV (for different reasons).
Usability of a ballot system is a big factor when it comes to voter engagement and turnout, so at this point, I would be very happy with approval-method ballots.
Or is the concern the possibility of confusion around "rank 1-5" vs "Score candidates out of 5" etc
If you say "Each candidate can be given up to 5 points, or as few as 0 points. There are no limits to the number of points you can give out in total (there are X candidates, so you could give a max of [X*5] points)." you're being pretty succinct and direct in the explanation. You might need more poll workers the first few years (which will create all kinds of problems because areas attempting to minimize voter turn out can exploit that) but once it becomes common you hope that people are used to it and know how the system works
The biggest thing is we need to eliminate the need to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of 2 evils. Obviously all republics involve some level of "this candidate is close enough to be my proxy" decision making, but I'm currently stuck voting for someone who was indicted while in office for political crimes because the alternative is worse.
Moving to either system helps break the 2 party system open...which is why nobody in establishment politics is making a big push to get it implemented.
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/AppCW
And today Fargo votes on it.
For instance if I want Candidate A to win, I'll give him a 10. But if I'm only half bought into candidate B, I can give them 5, and could give Candidate C nothing because I really don't like them. Now if the rest of the country doesn't like A, and the battle is between B and C, then I'd feel good that I could contribute to the goal.
The actual process is up for remix of course, but that was the idea.
One would work where you have 1 vote per ballot item. If there were 24 ballot items, you get 24 votes. You can allocate your votes across the ballot however you saw fit. If you thought president and senate were more important than city council and an infrastructure bond; you could put 18 votes for president, 6 votes for senate, and nothing for local issues. No idea how this would be normalized but it’s a novel concept.
Another idea is to rank options in each issue, and if my first option loses; my votes go to the second option. Say I wanted to vote libertarian for president in the US but was afraid it was a protest vote that wouldn’t win so I voted Democrat because I didn’t like the GOP candidate. Under this system I could say I want the libertarian candidate first, democrat second, and not pick the gop candidate.
After the votes were counted and the libertarian lost, my vote would be reallocated to the democrat; and the votes would be re-tallied. This would encourage people to vote for a non binary political candidate since they knew their vote wouldn’t be “thrown away”.
interesting concept indeed, but i think the normalization function would be a serious vulnerability. most state and national level elections in the US tend to be pretty close, so the normalization function would pretty much end up deciding the winner. people who realize this would fight hard to get a biased function implemented, and you would be stuck trying to explain statistics to the general public. basically the gerrymandering situation, but even harder for the public to understand.
That seems extremely problematic to have votes determined by ballot items. It's impossible to normalize it. Even if you just determined that "each voter nationwide gets X voting points" you'd have politicians that would try to dilute or concentrate their ballots in order to game things.
Yeeeyaw
The voting system sounds reasonable, except local, state and national elections are much more independent than you're describing. The Constitution specifically and purposefully separates these entities, and trying to sew the legislation together would be more of a nightmare than it's worth.
(If you're not familiar, approval voting is a special case of score voting where you are giving either a 0 or 1 to each candidate; in other words the range is binary. It's not quite as expressive for voters as score voting, but still a huge improvement over what we use now and pretty low on "voter regret" since it avoids having to vote strategically. And it's arguably easier to use and understand than score voting. I would be so happy with either score or approval.)
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