Voting System Reform Commission: Part 2

[Joe Republic]

I hope the Secretary of Forum Affairs will be open to considering other voting systems, as well as the ridiculously complicated Condorcet system.

[Joe Republic]

Would I be allowed to recommend that this Commission discuss another system of voting?  I'm not sure if this already exists by another name, but I've decided to call it 'scaled approval voting'.

The basic premise is a cross between preferential voting and simple approval voting.  Voters simply vote for the candidates they approve of, while also giving them a rating according to an arbitrary scale.

For example, let's say that an election has five candidates: A, B, C, D and E.  The rating scale would be out of 10, for argument's sake.  As a hypothetical voter, I consider Candidate C to be my favorite candidate, while Candidate D is my least favorite.  I consider Candidates B and E to be equally as good as each other, but only about half as good as C.  Candidate A is not considered a good candidate, but would still be preferred over Candidate D.  On my ballot, I list every candidate (including those I disapprove of), and give them a rating out of 10 (approve = 10; disapprove = 0).  So my hypothetical ballot would be as follows:

C: 10
B: 5
E: 5
A: 1
D: 0

These scores are then tallied up with other ballots, and we take it from there.  I haven't decided how we decide the result from those tallied scores yet, so I guess I'll leave that up to you guys.

[Joe Republic]

Blah blah blah

That's range voting.

Ah yes.  That piece of knowledge could have saved me some time and typing.

[Joe Republic]

Can I ask the Chairman to restore some order to this Commission's debate, please?

[Joe Republic]

The electoral college is a horrible system.

I'm very much inclined to agree.

I'll ask this question again: what is the point of having an electoral college system other than to just mindlessly model what the US does?  Given that we don't really have "states' rights" to protect, it seems to me that the only thing the electoral college system will do is make people mad that their vote counts less than someone else's.

I don't think it's just a mindless model of the U.S., more of a way to make the winner more clear and obvious.  No more grey-area, either the candidate wins or loses.

In the same way that Florida got so much attention in 2000 because its electoral votes mattered, but smaller (and closer) states didn't?  This would make things much more deeply confusing, and ultimately unfair.