Opinion of this voting system

[John Dule]

I think most people on here are dissatisfied with our current two-party, winner-take-all voting system. That probably goes for the rest of America as well. But how do we fix it? After all, American political institutions are completely skewed towards a system that creates two-party politics. Everyone wants a third party, but when you sit down in that voting booth, you always feel the immense pressure to do the utilitarian calculus of voting for the lesser evil. Simply put, to fix this, we have to change the way we vote.

Some have suggested a ranked-choice voting system. While I do like this idea, it has its problems. In Maine, Bruce Poliquin tried to halt the ranked-choice retabulation after he won the first round. When the first-round "winner" is announced, it awards them an unearned credibility. Secondly, if the system requires voters to rank every candidate, some voters may choose the first two or three candidates they prefer and then fill in the rest of the numbers at random-- especially if there are a lot of candidates in the race. Finally, the order in which the votes are reapportioned is somewhat arbitrary, as it ultimately depends on the preferences of the people who voted for the last-place candidate (see here):



So here's the hypothetical ballot I'm proposing:



In this system, you could cast a vote for as many candidates as you want. You would vote "Yes" if you would be satisfied with that candidate serving as president, and "No" if you would not be. If you were indifferent to a candidate, you could leave that box blank. For example, here's how I'd have filled out my 2016 ballot:



This system allows me to vote for Hillary Clinton and Gary Johnson-- the candidate who I begrudgingly supported due to the lesser-of-two-evils problem, and the candidate who I actually preferred. In this way, I can maximize the amount of information I communicate when I vote (in a way that I can't under a ranked-choice system), allowing for preferential tabulation to better reflect what I want as a voter (and thereby, what all voters in the country want). Maybe Trump would've still won a lot of votes in this system-- but if everyone else in the country hated him and wanted to vote against him, perhaps he'd have ended up in the negative digits!

Over time, as people begin to realize that non-Republicans and non-Democrats could conceivably win in this system, we would gravitate towards including more and more third-party candidates on the stage. Even better, this would solve our polarization problems by ending the dichotomy of the two-party system and ushering in a multipolar system of many diverse political parties.

What do you guys think? Better than what we have now? Better than the ranked-choice system?

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Most elections are about finding the least terrible candidate, not someone that would actually satisfy you.

[John Dule]

Most elections are about finding the least terrible candidate, not someone that would actually satisfy you.

That's exactly what this would do. The candidate who people hate the least would win.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My tendency is towards preferring IRV to this because IRV has more of a proven track record in other countries, but yes, this would be a massive improvement over the current system.

[John Dule]

My tendency is towards preferring IRV to this because IRV has more of a proven track record in other countries, but yes, this would be a massive improvement over the current system.

Do you agree with my problems with it, though? This system would communicate more information about each voter's preferences, which is why I think it's superior.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My tendency is towards preferring IRV to this because IRV has more of a proven track record in other countries, but yes, this would be a massive improvement over the current system.

Do you agree with my problems with it, though? This system would communicate more information about each voter's preferences, which is why I think it's superior.

I think that could be argued either way; this system is better at communicating which candidates a voter could actually tolerate having in office and which they couldn't, but IRV has more granularity regarding how much a voter likes or dislikes a candidate relative to other candidates.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What you're describing seems to be a form of approval voting (with the slight tweak that it adds a "neutral" option rather than just being approve/disapprove). In theory, there are strong arguments for it, but the problem is that it's one of the voting systems most susceptible to being gamed through strategic voting. Most committed partisans, if they see their favorite candidate in first or second place in the polla, would have an incentive to approve only that candidate and disapprove all the others. If they approve someone else, they know they'll decrease the chance of their favorite candidate getting in. Votes who approve of both leading candidates but prefer one would have an especially strong incentive to disapprove of the other.

One of the features I value most in a voting system is its ability to encourage the sincere expression of preferences, by guaranteeing voters that "voting their conscience" won't result in worse electoral outcomes. IRV scores pretty well on that metric (there are ways of gaming it out, but they require a level of acumen and foreknowledge that no voter would reasonably bother with), while alternative vote scores poorly, for the reasons I detailed.

[Slander and/or Libel]

My tendency is towards preferring IRV to this because IRV has more of a proven track record in other countries, but yes, this would be a massive improvement over the current system.

Do you agree with my problems with it, though? This system would communicate more information about each voter's preferences, which is why I think it's superior.

I think that could be argued either way; this system is better at communicating which candidates a voter could actually tolerate having in office and which they couldn't, but IRV has more granularity regarding how much a voter likes or dislikes a candidate relative to other candidates.

I wonder if there's some way to design a hybrid system that incorporates approval/disapproval into IRV. IRV definitely has some granularity about how much a voter likes or dislikes a candidate, but it doesn't distinguish between cases where you like your first choice 100% more than your second and where you like your first choice 1% more than your second. And it has no regard for where your preferences slip from "I approve of these candidates" to "I disapprove of these candidates." You usually have the option to stop ranking after the candidates you approve, but that's just giving up the chance to express any further preference among those candidates you disapprove.

Maybe a two-sided IRV, that would ask voters to rank candidates and also to put in a breakpoint where they move from approval to disapproval, and then tabulates not only the candidate with the most first choice votes, but the candidate with the most last choice votes. I might have a ballot that looks like:

Approve:

1) Warren
2) Harris
3) Biden

Disapprove:

4) Weld
5) Walsh
6) Trump

People could still leave candidates out of their rankings, but the first candidates would represent their strongest approvals and the last would represent their strongest disapprovals.

I don't know quite how this would be tabulated. Maybe instead of simply casting out the candidate with the lowest first choice approval, they could cast out the candidate with the highest first choice disapproval? Or a hybrid approach, where each candidate is ranked on both scales, and the candidate whose summed scores are highest is eliminated (for instance, say there are 20 candidates; candidate A has the 20th most first choice approval votes, but only the 5th most first choice disapproval votes, giving them a score of 25; candidate B has the 15th most first choice approval votes, but also the 15th most first choice disapproval votes, giving them a score of 30).

Anyway, this is all off the top of my head, and may be totally crazy. But one of the weaknesses of basic IRV is that strong second choice consensus picks can get tossed in the early rounds because they don't have that much first choice support.