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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I just learned about approval voting and it has my...approval.

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.

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This is why people who care about voting can't come together around up with a new voting system. They can't decide how to choose as a group ;_;

Nah, that's how the people who want to change the voting system kill time. People have their preferences, but they're fairly united in thinking most systems would be an improvement.

Sometimes I think a lottery system would be better...

I like Approval voting for single positions that are supposed to represent a community rather than a faction: mayor, governor, county commissioner, etc. Mixed member for legislative bodies and Ranked Choice for anything else.

Approval feels a bit too binary to me. I like the idea of scoring or ranking. Not sure how scoring doesn't get gamed by people giving 10's to the ones they like, ad 1's to the ones they don't, though.

It's not gaming the system, range voting is robust to such an expression of voter preferences. However, there is something to be said for simplifying the system if that ends up being the way that most people vote.

ScoreVoting.net/Honesty

Gamed? Surely this is exactly how it's intended to work?

Don't think of score of 1 as being 1/10, think of it as being an additional 1 point in a cumulative game. Insert saying about saving pennies here

IMO "gamed" is a bit of a strange choice of word. The whole point of score voting is to give each voter more power to express their true preference. If their preference is to assign top scores to several candidates, fantastic, thank you for your vote! If the next voter prefers to give more diversified scores, wonderful, thank you for voting! And if the next voter would prefer to rank order the candidates, you can do that too using score, so great, thank you for voting!

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.

Over time, the people who use middling scores might 'catch on' that doing that lessens their influence, so everyone starts gravitating towards the extremes?

IDK, I'd love to see it tried.

Probably, but we shouldn't expect to actually solve this entirely...if so, great, but realistically, anything better than the present is...better.

Surely one should be able to give a negative vote to somebody they didn't like?

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.

My first election reform activism was for IRV. It is mathematically better than approval voting.

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).

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