What's the best way to vote?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ย. 2024
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What's the best way to vote? Well, last month, several of YOU voted for the best way to vote, using four different voting systems. Here are the results.
Produced by Matt Beat. All images and video by Matt Beat, used under fair use guidelines, or found in the public domain. Music by Owl Nest and Kia from CreatorMix.com.
Here's an annotated script with footnotes: docs.google.co...
Ranked choice voting: • Ranked Choice Voting E...
Approval voting: • Approval Voting Explai...
Score voting: • Score Voting Explained...
STAR voting: • STAR Voting Explained ...
Fairvote: fairvote.org
Center for Election Science: electionscienc...
The Equal Vote Coalition: www.equal.vote...
Correction:
09:25 *Instead of averaging the scores, the sum of all scores could also be tallied alternatively
Sources/additional reading:
electionscienc...
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#voting #rankedchoicevoting #government
Here in the United States we mostly have plurality voting for elections, even though most Americans agree that it’s absolutely not the best way to do elections. (turns) Wait, what’s that, you don’t remember what plurality voting is?
Plurality voting is when a citizen only gets to vote for ONE candidate, and the candidate who gets the most votes, aka a plurality, wins the election. EVEN IF THEY DON’T GET THE MAJORITY OF VOTES.
If you want to learn more about why I think plurality voting sucks, check out this video here. I swear, all I do anymore is promote my own videos in my own videos. What is happening to me.
Anyway, organizations like The Center for Election Science, Fairvote, and The Equal Vote Coalition have been promoting better ways to vote for years. While all three organizations have talked trash about plurality voting, they all favor different solutions. The Center for Election Science tends to favor approval or score voting, Fairvote tends to favor ranked choice voting, and The Equal Vote Coalition is all about STAR voting.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:54 YouGov
2:48 Approval voting
4:42 Score voting
6:38 Ranked-choice voting
8:50 STAR voting
11:57 How YOU voted
15:31 Outro
What's your favorite type of voting?
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Idk
Thank you for being based and loving democracy. It seems that facts almost always favor liberals 😂😏
Election fraud (SUS)😳
My favorite type of voting for US president is using the popular vote instead of the backward electoral college. If we had done so in 2016 then Don the Con Trump would never have been US president.
Give me ¥1 trillion Mr Breast of YT 🙏
Although we might disagree on what is the best voting system, there's one thing we can all agree on: Mr. Beat ranks first in our heart
Awwwww thank you
First in war; first in peace; and first in the hearts of his TH-camrs.
We might disagree on what is the best voting system, but there's one thing we can all agree on: polarity voting is the worst
@@iammrbeat mr breast give me money
@@GutsyTen42 If you don't mind, what is polarity voting? I've never heard of it.
I really like Rank Choice Voting for primaries. A recent-ish example in my state. The Republican primary for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa in 2018 had 5 different candidates and the winner prevailed with only 34.7% of the vote. It is hard to argue that plurality voting resulted in any type of consensus in that election.
'Consensus' means 100% of the vote.
Which you don't get with plurality voting.
@@Michael-mh2tw The other definition of consensus is, “The judgment arrived at by most of those concerned”
But Macron would have won with RCV!
TIL Iowa elects their secretary of agriculture
I prefer the Buclin Voting system where candidates are ranked, but unlike the Instant Runoff voting, no candidate’s votes are ever eliminated. Instead, if no candidate in the first vote tally receives an absolute majority of votes, then the second choices among the voters are added to the first choices; if after the second tally there is still no candidate with an absolute majority, then the third choices are added to the first and second choices. This process would repeat itself until there is a candidate that reaches the required threshold. Theoretically, it’s possible under the Buclin system for a candidate to win an election even if a/he was in last place in the first round of vote tally.
I had heard of Star voting, but didn't actually understand how it worked, so thank you for this video. Having seen how that works, I would tend to agree that Star voting is the best choice. There is a movement in Oregon to make that the voting method for the state. I will definitely be supporting that going forward.
I worry it (And Score) favors bland candidates who appeal to a niche group. My quintessential example would be Andrew Yang. He's come under fire recently, but in 2020 Dem primary he wasn't a high choice for very many, but an overwhelming top choice for a few, so on a score card we see Sanders and Biden with like 3-4/5 each (primary candidates only), Buttigeg and Klobuchar a bit lower than that, then Yang with like 4.5 because because nobody rates him particularly low, but many don't rate him at all, and his group rates him super highly. But he's not strong ranked choice at all, and just denies someone with higher total support a chance.
If Score is adjusted that not rating a candidate assumes the average score or average score of all candidates, instead of not factoring, then it's fine, or I suppose you could treat it like Amazon reviews where we only consider people with higher amounts of reviews and pity the little guys.
Of course, this will be mitigated by the fact that, in a Score system, the voter is incentivized to rate everyone zero except their preferred candidate. People who genuinely are on the fence may score a few reasonably, but in a tight race, you want to weight the average as much as you can, so for instance in 2020 I'd have rated Sanders 10, Warren 9, the rest of the dem candidates 4-6, and Trump 0, and at that point I'm not sure what the value add it gives over simple ranked. I guess that I can rank multiple people #1 for the initial vote?
@@mjp121 Your worries are not applicable. STAR and score wouldn't use averages when tallying, but totals. Blank scores default to zero. There's no risk for an unknown candidate getting promoted above everyone else due to a vocal minority. It would require everyone also giving a significant amount of support to that candidate, and if they do get support across the board why shouldn't they become a finalist?
Furthermore, a "bland candidate" by definition won't get enough support by everyone to become a main contender, because many people, just like you, wouldn't like them anyway. Also, politics is not 1-dimensional. A consensus candidate is not a "centrist" or a "bland candidate".
@@1ucasvb that’s not how the system has been described, friend. The system, as described, has you use the averages *of the people who voted for you*, and blanks are not counted as zero. Each candidate potentially has a different number of votes to average with
@@mjp121In STAR voting, most people not having an opinion and not marking would automatically make someone like Andrew Yang lose in the automatic runoff round. That being said, blank not counted as 0 would shove more well known but not as avidly liked (naturally) candidates off the ballot, which is a problem with most runoff systems.
It also doesn't meet majority criterion (candidate with > 50% vote in a first preference/plurality system must win) which is a huge flaw IMO, even if the chance is low
I like that all of these options seem to place focus on the candidate and not their party. 'Red or Blue' is binary which seems easy - but just makes us more polarized and not really focused on the best candidate; their experience, integrity and how well they listen and communicate to all constituents, etc.
I think a lot of the country is shades of purple and not as extreme as the two parties would like us to believe. Also candidates would have to have their own platform of issues, not just copy a political party stump speech (which often aren't relevant to the county, district or state.)
Thank you @Mr.Beat!
Heck yeah. Well put!
Switching to something like ranked-choice would itself get rid of the two-party system.
The parties aren’t monolithic, they’re factionalized. Get rid of FPTP and they’ll schism due to their factions no longer being in fear of the spoiler effect.
At least several European countries use some kind of proportional representation system where instead of a single candidate being selected per constituency, you have larger areas that elect several (often 10+) representatives. In a typical system, all the votes for each party are summed up, the party with the most votes gets one seat (e.g. the highest individual votes within that party, or the party's selected primary candidate) and for the next round their tally is halved (if they get another seat, then 1/3, etc.). Thus if one party gets 30 % of votes, they're likely to get around 30 % of seats in that constituency.
I think that might be the most realistic way to get out of a 2-party system. Obviously there's little interest in an existing 2-party state to introduce anything that would compromise their power. But I thought it was a bit odd to go into detail on various lipstick-on-a-pig systems and only have a throwaway mention for a system that's already widely used and has proven to promote great diversity in representational democracy.
Most people are not purple. Especially now.
Also I see a point in some of this but you'd still need to trim a candidate pool fast and that's why parties are important.
Also parties are fairly diverse, even Dems and Republicans have many caucuses and factions.
That's why it isn't changed (imo). It would erode the two party system, leaving space for shades of purple, and of course green and yellow (at least that's what our "libertarian" party has as a colour).
Great video! I agree that plurality voting is awful and it should be replaced with either ranked choice or STAR.
Thanks Sami! Glad you APPROVE of RCV and STAR voting. I assume you would SCORE them high. 😏
@Mr. Beat I see what you did there 😂
2 days ago? How did you get access to a video just uploaded 2 minutes ago from my perspective?
The main issue with these (though current system is plenty opaque in USA also) is because they are more than counting then the source code needs to be open source.
My favorite type of voting for US president is using the popular vote instead of the backward electoral college. If we had done so in 2016 then Don the Con Trump would never have been US president.
Twice impeached Trump was the worst US president in history for many reasons.
#1) Trump committed an act of treason against the US by inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.
#2) Trump’s incompetence regarding his management of the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic between January 2020 and July of 2020. Thousands of US citizens died as a result Trump’s failure. If Trump had a proper immediate response to the pandemic the way that the South Korean government did, then thousands of US citizens who died would still be alive today.
#3) In April of 2019 Trump vetoed the resolution to end US military support of Saudi Arabia's GENOCIDE of thousands of innocent civilians in Yemen! Trump was using the US military to support GENOCIDE in Yemen!
#4) Trump violated the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution for his entire 4 years in office, then in 2019 Trump verbally mocked the US Constitution. The foundation of the USA is the US Constitution, that is why the presidential inaugural oath includes to swear to protect and defend the US Constitution. In January 2017 Trump publicly swore an oath on a bible at his inauguration ceremony to protect and defend the US Constitution. In 2019 Trump mocked the US Constitution by publicly saying the words "phony emoluments clause".
#5) Trump misogynistically and adulterously said of women: "Grab them by the pussy."! Trump committed adultery with Stormy Daniels and then tried to cover it up. Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was in prison for crimes related to Trump's cover-up of his adulterous scandal with Stormy Daniels. Most Republicans claim to be the moral party and/or the majority Christian party, but hypocritically enthusiastically want to give an adulterous Donald Trump, another 4 years in office. If a US president who was a member of the Democratic Party did the terrible things Trump has, of course, the Republican Party leaders would be screaming for his removal from office.
#6) Trump committed the crime of obstruction of justice.
#7) Trump committed crimes of trying to tamper with elections, especially in Georgia.
#8) Trump's attempted abuse of power regarding Ukraine.
#9) Trump committed tax fraud in New York State, which why Trump hid his tax returns for years.
#10) Trump practiced corrupt nepotism as he appointed unqualified members of his family into positions of power in the executive branch of government.
#11) Trump illegally destroyed documents and illegally took documents with him after he left the office of president.
There are many other horrible things about Trump. Here are some of them: Donald Trump is a dumb corrupt businessman which is why he hid his tax returns. Donald Trump is not a self-made man, he benefited from nepotism. His daddy Fred Trump gave him millions of dollars to start businesses many of which have failed! Donald Trump's failed businesses are many but include: Trump Airlines, a Trump Casino, and Trump University. With his failed Trump University, he defrauded hundreds of students. In Trump's many construction projects he failed to pay some of his contractors. Trump committed fraud with his non-profit in New York State which is why Trump recently transferred his residence to Florida. Donald Trump is too stupid to write his own book which why he hired a ghost writer to write "The Art of the Deal". When Trump was in high school, he hired another boy to take his SAT college entrance exam. Trump claims that he is smart, but he refuses to show us his college transcripts. Donald Trump's daddy bribed a physician to write that Donald Trump had bone spurs and therefore could dodge the Vietnam War draft. Donald Trump and his dad also practiced racism in who they would rent properties to in the 1960s and 1970s. That is just scratching the surface of the long list of horrible things about Donald Trump.
I had never heard of STAR voting, so going into it I was thinking ranked-choice was the way to go, but the way you explained STAR voting makes me think I might prefer it over ranked choice. I'll have to do some research, though
Agreed.
Remember: Listening to Joe Rogan isn't doing your own research.
@@HOTD108_ I'm not even sure who exactly that is
star is an interesting idea, but it was only invented a few years ago, it's never even been tried. you can't really blame states and cities for not implementing it at the same scale as RCV. Star is still in the testing phase. They need to focus on just one or 2 cities adopting it, so they can gather some data.
it just doesn't make sense (to me) for star to jump to the front of the national movement for election reforms. it's not ready yet.
The problem with star is that it is far more arbitrary than RCV. It’s less concrete and allows the voter to be more indifferent or worse, sabotage anything other than their favorite. With RCV, you have to compare all of them to each other objectively and really think about the differences and which you’d prefer if your first choice didn’t succeed.
Hi, I'm from Germany where you've got 20+ parties to vote between. For that matter I find ranked-choice voting too complex. I prefer score or STAR voting so the results for smaller parties are more accurate.
(Also I think the scores should be ranging from -2 to +2 instead of 1-5 because it is easier to understand that 0 means indifferent instead of 3)
What? You just said that ranked choice is too complex and just recommended 2 systems that are more complex.
Also, I don’t see why anyone would vote -1 instead of -2. They’re just going to think about how much they hate that candidate and always vote -2. Even though voting “-1” is about the same as voting “1” in the 0-5 system they’re not going to think of it the same way.
Also, while score voting usually treats non votes as “0”, that’s not the version this video talked about. So I don’t know what you’re talking about about anything
I think that on countries that have many parties, we could have voters rank their top 5.
I don't know how it works on Germany, but in Brazil every candidate has a number. So you could put the number of your 5 favorites from 1st to 5th.
@@francisluglio6611 RCV is easily more complex than score or STAR.
@@galiantus1354 not for the people to understand and only because SCORE and STAR have shortcuts compared to just RCV. The mechanics are what matters for voters and their understanding.
You dont have to rank everyone with RCV. You can just rank the candidates you care most about, and then leave the rest blank.
All that means is that once your vote has iterated through all the candidates you ranked, you have equal preference for any of the remaining candidates and thus your vote no longer has an influence on the election once your ranked candidates are out.
That said, there is merit to a score style voting system like score voting or star since you can put your LEAST favorite candidates under candidates you are more indifferent to, where as in RCV, in order to rank your lowest candidates, you have to actually rank them all.
Good work getting the word out there about STAR voting! You're a real supernova for that.
I see what you did there. :)
Nice joke!
I think if nothing else, the election shows that ranked choice voting is probably the most well-known of alternative voting systems, at least among your base.
Yep. I'd also argue it's the most well-known outside my viewership as well.
100th like!
I mean, you can never truly take the popularity contest out of voting. That is kind of the point. Still, my take away leaves me much more favorable to Star after years of misconception around Ranked Choice thanks to an unconscious bandwagon bias.
@@michaeljmeyer3 Orrrr, there’s a reason it’s more popular and you feel insecure about your favorite one.
@@Fractured_Unity yeah, bandwagon bias.
0:11 plurality voting
0:57 better voting methods
2:48 approval voting
3:43 benefits
4:08 drawbacks
4:39 score voting
5:38 benefits
6:02 drawbacks
6:37 ranked-choice voting
7:50 benefits
8:17 drawbacks
8:48 STAR voting
3:58 benefits
10:21 drawbacks
10:45 common benefits
11:26 which is best?
15:31 what’s your favorite?
@@jacklazzaro9820 thank you
My personal preference is using approval voting for primaries. Then after you've narrowed down the field, you use a condorcet method like ranked pairs to find the consensus candidate.
Huh, I've read and watched a lot about voting methods and this is the first time I'm hearing of STAR voting.
I was always for ranked-choice for well over a decade now... but now that I have heard of STAR, I'm on the STAR wagon and Ranked-Choice is my clear 2nd place.
Thank you Mr Beat!
That's interesting. I started out with RCV as well, but in recent years I've come to favor both STAR and Approval. I think a lot of it is just money and advertising. Most people don't know about any of these methods, so they latch on to whatever is presented first without really thinking.
First of all, thank you so much for another great video! My problem with ranked choice voting is that by putting so much emphasis on "first place" votes, a lot of centrists who would be many voters' second choice would be at a disadvantage. In this sense, I think RCV still has a problem with potential strategic gimmicking. Primer has a great video on the math (and drawbacks) behind RCV and approval voting, but what really bugs me is when voters have strong opinions on RCV being the best alternative without considering the math behind the wide variety of non-plurality systems. Often times, such strong opinion is itself motivated by partisan incentive as well.
Thank you for pointing to a source of information on the topic.
>a lot of centrists would be at a disadvantage
Big if true. Centrists are the reason regressive legislation is ever passed. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” (Martin Luther King)
The Approval winner being different than the other voting methods isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. Approval is the one system among those you mentioned that leans hard into a consensus candidate rather than a majoritarian candidate.
More discussion needs to happen on which voting systems are better for what context. Majoritarian systems are more likely to have a larger number of disenfranchised (i.e. “my candidate didn’t win”) voters than consensus systems, which lends itself to polarization. But a much smaller group of disenfranchised voters has much less power, potentially being completely disenfranchised, while a larger group has enough coalition power to advocate for themselves even if they lose the election.
Great argument, thanks for the comment!
Yes! This is something lacking from most of these discussions: different voting methods work better for different contexts. This isn't an all-or-nothing debate. There is no reason we can't vary the voting method based on what is desirable for the situation.
My favorite type of voting is one I invented that I call Weighted Voting, and it's interesting, because I realized now that it kind of blends the strengths of RCV and Approval voting.
The way it works is you rank all the candidates just like in RCV. Although there would also be an option to abstain from/disapprove of a candidate. The difference is that each rank is assigned a weighted point value. For example, in an election with 5 candidates, your 1st choice will get 5 points, and your 5th choice will get 1 point. Any abstained/disapproved candidates will get 0 points. Then you just add up the total points for each candidate, and the person with the most points wins.
Like RCV, it still benefits by taking preference into account, but it also actually represents a consensus, by fully accounting for all the non-primary votes. It could actually lead to instances where a candidate that is more broadly liked wins, that in RCV might not have won.
@@peterlewis2178 Congratulations, you invented the Borda Count voting method named for the 18th Century mathematician Jean-Charles de Borda.
"Borda is the only proposed method that I know of that can fail to elect a candidate who is the voted favorite of a majority." - Mike Ossipoff
@@pace1195 Yeah, I learned that later in a different comment thread. Although there are a couple small differences in my version, namely the ability to abstain from votes.
That's kind of a funny quote, because while it may be capable of failing a candidate who is the voted favorite of _A_ majority, it's also the only one I've seen that can't fail to elect the most favorite of _THE_ majority.
The results are most likely due to ranked choice being the most well known alternative system as it is championed in a few places online
Yep!
Orrrr, there’s a reason it’s more popular and you feel insecure about your favorite one.
@Fractured Unity
I'd like to hear your argument for why ranked choice is better than star.
@@Fractured_Unity The reason it's more popular is because it's been promoted in the US for longer, with false claims like "It fixes the spoiler effect" or "It makes it safe to vote honestly without wasting your vote". People believe these claims and pass them on without fact-checking, and now it's the most popular because nobody understands how it actually works. 😒
@@Prolute Because in RCV the priority of the voter is to compare all of the candidates against each other directly instead of against some arbitrary rating scale. Also, of the non-plurality voting options, it deincentivizes strategies to optimize your favorite candidate’s chances the most. The best strategy in RCV is what’s best for everyone: picking your candidates based on who you prefer in descending order.
I like STAR Voting as well. I like being able to show my preference between candidates, and I like that STAR Voting adds up all the data. I like the ballot on Ranked choice, but it sometimes gives weird results in competitive elections with 3 or more people. Examples include center squeeze, and favorite betrayal issues.
Center squeeze (and thus favorite betrayal) are both easily solved simply by changing the criteria for who to eliminate each round to the candidate that loses the most head-to-head matchups.
@@TheFinalChapters Despite being a "ranked" method, that would no longer qualify as what most people mean when they say "ranked choice voting". That would be a Condorcet compliant method.
@@galiantus1354 You're not wrong.
It still involves the voters ranking their choices just like in RCV though.
Totally, the Instant Runoff variant of Ranked choice is the main problem. I'd be happy to support any of the Condorcet variants of Ranked choice
The problem with STAR voting is that a minority of passionate zealots can simply run two identical candidates to force the second round 1v1 to be between them and themselves. It doesn't eliminate the major weakness of Score voting, simply moves it a bit further on. It would just end up as score voting but with paired candidates/parties.
Before today, I liked the idea of ranked choice voting. Now that I've heard of Star Voting, I'm going to have to look further into that since it sounds intriguing.
In Australia, we use Ranked Choice (called Preferential Voting here) for our Federal House of Representatives and most of our state's lower house seats. To make counting easier on Election night, the Electoral Commission make a guess as to what the top 2 candidates will be, so when counting votes, the counters keep track of both the 1st preference, and the winner of the 2 preferred candidates. That way, if the count goes into multiple rounds, the media etc has a good idea of who may win if its between those guessed candidates.
Yep. It's in every single-member seat. All lower houses (federal, state, territory) except Tasmania, and in Tasmania's upper house. All multi-member seats use similar system.
They're all "Anyone who has enough votes for a seat gets one. Then if there are still empty seats, and no-one has enough votes for a seat, eliminate the lowest candidate and re-allocate their votes to their voters' next choice. Repeat until all seats are filled or there are exactly enough candidates remaining to fill all the seats.
The number of required votes (the "quota") is calculated as ⟦Total valid votes ÷ (Number of seats + 1) + 1, then drop fractions⟧. Single member electorates also follow this, but it just simplifies to 50% of the valid votes.
Voting usually closes at 6pm, or sometimes 8pm. Vote-counting starts straight away, and early result are known quite quickly for single-member seats. If it's very close, the media says so. For multi-member seats, the media instead relies on polls, and previous results to predict what might happen. The last few seats can take several weeks to determine, but they rarely have much effect on the party balance.
Apart from not using Plurality voting, the other thing Australia does is compulsory voting. Many people find it a bother and just vote for one of the two major parties, but it'a really hard to waste your vote. Because you have to fill in all the preferences (for single-seat elections), your vote is still in the running when the winner is decided. If there's a very popular candidate, you either win or lose in the first count. But if the voting is such that all but two candidates are eliminated, your vote is still going to be counted in the last round. You might have lost all your preferred candidates, but at least you have a final say about which villain you don't want!
Australian here. Would point out that "ranked choice voting" and "instant runoff voting" are not interchangeable terms. There are different types of ranked choice voting, instant runoff being by far the most common and the type shown here. Theoretically the fairest ranked choice voting system is Condorcet, which is also more tolerant of blank or tied rankings (eliminating the need for conscientious voters to research obscure candidates), but nobody uses it because it doesn't scale well and is hard to verify by hand.
Good point. Unfortunately, the two terms are interchanged here in the States. I guess to attempt to simplify it for the normies.
Condorcet is a standard, not a method. Though there are systems that actually implement the criterion, such as Ranked Robin, which I assert is far more scalable and verifiable than IRV.
I live in New Jersey. thanks to you I am emailing my State lawmakers to push for this.
You forgot about my favorite, 3-2-1 voting! Every voter can give as many candidates as they like an "approval," "neutral," or "disapproval" rating. Three semifinalists are chosen, with the most "approval" votes. Out of those, two finalists are chosen, with the least "disapproval" votes. The winner is then whichever finalist more people choose over the other.
For the US, I say a proportional system designed by a Citizens Assembly is the way to go. Rural-Urban proportional I say is a great option in my opinion because it also considers the rural-urban divide. And it is impossible to gerrymander a proportional system.
Rural-Urban in a simple term is the STV proportional system for cities where ranked ballots are used and rurals get a form of MMP or the German system. The House would likely have to increase in size though and changes to Senate as well. But it means more parties will appear and have a chance of winning. And more choice. Plus parties must work together so hyper partisanship would be political suicide.
@@processlayer1212 Tell me more :0
I must learn way more about this. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
@@NightspeakerR The rural part has people vote as normal using plurality or ranked voting. But they get a separate vote for a party. This is MMP.
The party list can be open or closed. A closed list means the party will choose the list members who are used to make sure parties have seats in proportion to their popular vote. Ex 34% of the vote means 34% of seats. An open list means voters can choose their list members. Thresholds can be implemented at a national scale or each state can have their own thresholds. CA could have a 5% threshold for list seats in that state while TX could have 4%.
STV for the urban portion combines ranked ballots with PR. It is more complicated to explain. I recommend checking out CGP Grey’s video on STV.
Alternatively, all seats can be used using only STV or MMP. Rural-Urban just combines the two.
@@iammrbeatNo problem.
I vote this video first place in its ability to explain alternative voting methods.
Awww thanks!
Yay for STAR Voting! More fair, more transparent, doesn't require centralized tabulation. Best of all, it prevents vote-splitting. (RCV mitigates vote-splitting but doesn't prevent it.)
ultra-ultra-complicated, with tons of extra steps, and for that, never has a chance to be approved for and stay. Approval voting also prevents vote-splitting since you can vote for all parties with similar ideas if you want.
@@Game_Hero I don't think STAR Voting is too complicated. It's only two steps (scoring round and runoff round). But I do like Approval Voting too, so I fully support that.
@@anniekallen4472 it's too complicated for me, If I had to explain it to my grandma, she probably wouldn't get it, contrary to approval voting where it's really "vote, but for all boxes you want instead of just one". And what if you have difficulty writing clearly readable numbers, because of parkinson for instance? Also, the fact it will generate extra costs is an automatic lost for its chances to be approved and implemented (and more importantly, kept).
@@Game_Hero The ballot completion step is pretty simple in STAR Voting ("Score candidates on a scale of 0-5"). Most people have no problem understanding that. The numbers wouldn't be written in; It would be a set of bubbles. That being said, I understand your concern, and Approval Voting is absolutely the best voting method if simplicity is your priority. It's almost as accurate as STAR Voting (especially with an Approval primary plus Approval general election), so it's really great bang for your buck.
In the votings to pick which was my favorite, I picked Ranked Choice Voting. After watching the video I think that STAR voting is the best. The reason I didn’t vote for it, and I assume why others didn’t rank it number one either, is because I didn’t really understand it. Thanks for making the video and allowing us to vote!
What stops STAR voting from resulting in a minority of super passionate zealots from simply running two identical candidates and forcing the final 1v1 to be between them and themselves?
My Unalloyed favorites for legislatures are STV (like Ranked Choice, but implemented in Multi-Member districts instead of single-member districts, further discouraging gerrymandering and other strategic voting manipulation) and MMP (Some fraction of seats elected directly through one of the methods described in the video, and then the rest filled in through a Proportional Representation system)
For Executive positions I would go for Ranked Choice or STAR-probably Ranked Choice simply because it’s easier to understand, which has value in transparently showing the public that the election was free and fair.
And I think Approval has an excellent niche: bureaucratic, judicial, and other ideally nonpartisan oversight positions (if elected at all, ofc), where you’re supposed to be looking for a fair neutral arbiter that both the majority AND minority can agree on, and a “controversial” is inherently problematic.
I really like how you view election methods as tools for specific situations, rather than latching on to one method as the holy grail to solve all problems. Too many people compare methods as being better or worse as a method, without considering the application. This is really why RCV has got some backlash as of late - it has been promoted to some states and jurisdictions as a means to an end, rather than a solution for their situation.
Do a video on using the shortest split line method to create districts for voting to prevent gerrymandering!
Also please do on video on voter referendums
Both are great ideas. Thanks Elizabeth!
Love this video. I *think* I voted for RCV in one of the polls because it was the only one I'd heard of. Now you need to do another poll.
I am one hundred percent for any type of voting that decreases or gets rid of gerrymandering entirely. However, I'm curious if you would agree that more complicated types of voting will turn off more of the voters that are not inclined to do their homework on the candidates? And how do you think the parties will deal with any of these?
The two major political parties already mostly hate RCV since it props up third party candidates. :/
@@iammrbeat RCV doesn't really help third parties, because it still suffers from the vote-splitting/spoiler effect when they become popular.
@@iammrbeat Having seen it in practice and simulation, that is not true. IRV is mostly just a way for voters who vote for a third party candidate to not have their vote thrown away. It doesn't actually help third parties all that much. To get an idea of this, look at the difference between Australia's upper and lower houses: their upper house uses STV, which leads to relative proportionality and helps third parties get in. Their lower house uses IRV, and while there is certainly more third-party presence than anywhere in US government, it is still effectively a two-party system.
Mr. Beat! I would have liked to have seen you also evaluate proportional representation voting. It was very popular starting during the Progressive Era up through the 1930s in Municipal Elections throughout the country. The two major parties hated it since it blunted the effect of partisan voting in areas where they clearly dominated in party registration.
I'm surprised you didn't mention condorcet voting, which is my favorite type of voting system. It's a type of ranked-choice voting, but it's different from instant run-off voting. You rank all your favorite candidates in order, just like instant run-off voting, and then, when all ballots are in, it's determined, based on the rankings, who would win in each head-to-head matchup. If there were 4 candidates, A, B, C and D, it's determined who would win in a head-to-head matchup of only A vs. B, then A vs. C, A vs. D, B vs. C, B vs. D and C vs. D. Whichever candidate wins the most of those head-to-head matchup wins. It's my personal favorite type of voting because it allows voters to give the full range of their preferences as well as giving a boost to third party candidates. In a sense, it combines the best aspects of both approval voting and instant run-off voting. Its two biggest flaws are that if a voter doesn't rank every candidate, they won't have a say in certain head-to-head matchups, which may determine the actual winner. Also, if there's 3 candidates and they each win one head-to-head matchup, it fails to select a winner. In the case where the latter happens, I say it should switch to instant run-off voting and have the candidate who got the least first-choice votes have those votes distributed between those voters' second choice.
I mentioned it at the end of this video actually.
@@iammrbeat Oh, my bad. I stopped watching after the "Thank you Patreon supporters!" message popped up.
I understand the appeal of Condorcet/Smith/ISDA methods but I really don't like that they do not satisfy later-no-harm criterion and later-no-help criterion which makes me nervous to while ranking to not hurt my favourite candidate. So personally if IRV winner is not the same person as Condorcet/Smith/ISDA winner I would just do a run-off between those two. And using this approach makes strategic voting extremely hard (if not impossible) because IRV is resistant to burying and bullet voting while Condorcet methods are resistant to push-over voting, so trying to vote tactically seems to be always nullify by the potential run-off. Unless you find a way to screw both systems simultaneously
@@Hadar1991 I don't like judging a voting system JUST by if it fails a criteria, but how often if fails and how hard it fails. A Condorcet method doesn't fail LNH unless it creates a cycle which would be pretty rare. Even when it does fail, i will be a soft fail. When IRV on the other hand fails the favorite betrayal criterion, it fails hard and it is more likely to fail when there is polarization.
@@Mutex50 To be honest, I would be a rare occurrence that IRV winner is not a ISDA winner, so I think that runoff between IRV and ISDA winners in the rare occurrence it is not the same person it is far better solution than debating for next 20 years if IRV or ranked pairs would be a better voting system. 😅
Oh, and all Condorset methods fail No-favourite-betrayal, only score/approval voting meets this criterion and I am against scores for reason I have described earlier. 😅
I love you Mr. Beat. Your confident, funny, and informative delivery is tough to "beat" in this age.
This should be shown in every high school US government class
i'd preffer one without his personal opinions putted in to truly have an educative value ad let students truly make their own mind without being teased to pick one based on his biaises.
Ranked is worst < Approval < Score < STAR < STAR but scoring from -3 to +3 would be the best.
STAR Voting should be represented -3 to +3 instead of 0 to 5 which would be the most accurate voting system. + score means people like you and - score means people hate you. Then just pick the two most popular and compare all votes between the two who won more votes. Not perfect by no means but just solid system.
Ranged Vote is just two parties telling people to place the party candidate as 2 spot and vote your favored as 1 giving you the illusion of choice while betting that no one will just instantly win. If no one wins with 50% votes it becomes two party vote and having multiple candidate where only the spot 1 matters you almost never have instant win which is why Ranked vote is just two party vote.
Approval Voting is great for when you need a consensus pick, for example, where to go for lunch. You'll end up with an answer that will make most people at least somewhat happy.
Well spread the word then!
@@iammrbeat I think a good approach towards this topic in the future is to frame each method in terms of what problem it's actually trying to solve.
RCV/IRV is a conflict-resolution method: there are multiple factions competing against one another, and none of them want to compromise unless forced to. You want to ensure the dominant faction wins. You achieve this by forcing the smaller factions to compromise one by one, until a majority faction is found.
Score/Approval are a semi-competitive consensus method: there are multiple factions, but they have a choice to compete or not. You want to find the biggest overlap between the factions willing to cooperate. If they want to cooperate, the winner's approval will be large, possibly >50%. If they do not want to cooperate, it will be small, and you have a very factional situation. In that case, the winner will be the dominant faction.
STAR is a competitive consensus method: There are factions, they can cooperate or not, but you make an effort to get them to cooperate first. If they do, the best compromise is chosen and the majority faction still has veto power. If they don't cooperate, the majority faction gets its way anyway, so it's still fine.
I think the above descriptions really highlight the differences in the voting methods in terms that are understandable to a regular person. These are basically human descriptions of the mathematics underlying each method.
Yeah it's great for quick consensus elections. CGP Grey has a video about it. You could even do Score voting by counting thumbs up as +1, thumbs down as -1, and averaging out sideways or hidden thumb.
I strongly agree with this. I used to be part of a board game group full of nerds where we would start every session by voting for the game we wanted to play using ranked-choice voting (STV). Eventually we ended up switching to approval voting because it was easier to figure out how you wanted to vote, and easier to tally up the results at the end. My feeling was that it worked better overall.
Once again another banger video. I hadn't even heard of STAR voting what with all the hype around RCV supported by movements like RepresentUs and Forward Party and whatnot; my eyes have been opened!
Now go talk to RepresentUs and Forward Party and convince them to push better systems than RCV. :D RCV is especially bad for the Forward Party because it suffers from the center-squeeze effect, which hurts moderate/centrist candidates.
One thing people will point out with ranked choice re: election security, is that it is impossible to tabulate locally, so I would disagree with the point that it's more secure than approval voting or score voting.
If we, for example had nation-wide RCV to pick the president, then the US government would have to run the election, collect all the ballots from the states, and then run millions of ballots in one centralized location. With score, approval, or STAR, the results are precinct summable, so you can have each local government tabulate, send the results to the state, then the state tabulates and sends the results to the US gov't, etc. which helps with security since it's simpler to audit.
Yep. And considering we're a military superpower, we have to be really concerned about security. We can't have Russia or China putting their toe on the scale, or even give people more reason to worry about that happening. Plurality is summable, and yet many people sincerely believe our two latest presidents were/are foreign assets.
STAR voting seems great, and is probably better than instant runoff voting is, but I feel that the jump from plurality voting to STAR would be a lot easier with a halfway system for transition, literally pick one anything is better than plurality voting.
Approval voting is the most natural halfway system for that. It is visually like Plurality, but it teaches voters they can express an opinion on multiple candidates.
Everyone who took the time to do that survey and watch this video (including me), should all reach out to their STATE legislators to advocate for ranked-choice voting. States decide how elections are run within their borders (including federal elections), so that's where we should direct our energy if we want this to become a reality.
Definitely! I should have mentioned this in the video!
Most other voting systems have implications on legislator construction vs just the voting process you discussed.
We need a head to of the other voting systems.
1. MMP+ (IRV or STV)
2. STV
3.MMP
4. Full party proportional
5. IRV
My favourite type of voting is proportional representation. My suggestion would be that every state function as a single constituency. Therefore, there would be 50 constituencies, with variation in amount of seats. So 52 seats can be appointed out to candidates/candidate lists (parties) in California. So a Californian party could be representated in Congress, if they get 1,93% of the Californian votes. Likewise, Kansas gets 4 seats, which are distributed proportional to the statewide votes. Although local communities are not representation in the same way as under FTPT, it is difficult to argue that a community is small when the district's population is about 733.085 (more than the population of Wyoming). By adopting PR in each state we can elimate gerrymandering and represent the cummultative interests of each state gets representated.
I like it
European here - proportional voting sucks, because you are never voting for people but for parties. You think that US congressman vote to much accordingly to party lines? In proportional representation you could just have party leaders in the Congress, each with different number of votes assigned to them. Because in proportional representation it is impossible to win a seat as independent (because you have to have a whole party, because you vote for parties not people) so the leader can always kick out someone from party and his carrier is over or he has to join the other party. No whip needed, because if you vote against your party leader you will stop be congressman after the term.
FPTP has massive problems, but USA and UK politicians as faaaaaaaaaaaar more independent than those in proportional representation countries. Oh, and forget that in proportional system anybody tries to do anything for his constituency - there is no incentive to do so because you are voting for party not for people and the party leaders decide who the people will be.
@@Hadar1991
Australia senate here.
You can vote for a party above the line or individuals below the line.
The party vote then ranks the candidates from 1-x and they are then treated as individuals.
Yes it ends up being party list but occasianly their are supprises.
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My suggesion to improve the senate system would be to assign the party votes to the individauls equally.
@@catprog Australian Senate uses STV which is not a strictly proportional system. STV is somewhat proportional but in essence it is a majoritarian system using ranking voting. The more members are in district the more proportional it became, but it is also true for FPTP in multi-member districts. Your Senate STV is way better system than any proportional system in continental Europe. Usually saying "proportional system" people (at least in Europe) have in mind party-list proportional representation.
You have convinced me. I know like STAR more than RCV!
Woahness. I'm so glad to hear it!
I had a strong preference towards Ranked Choice going into this video. I had felt as though Star voting had a level of complexity to it that did not offset the potential gains from accuracy. Arguably, limited research on my part, and more intuition. Your awesome presentation here changed my mind, I rank Star higher than Ranked choice.
How is STAR more complex than RCV? STAR only ever has two rounds. Scoring is part of our lexicon already. 5 star hotel, 5 star restaurant, 5 star recruit.
@@duncansiror5033 It is confusing for the person casting the votes. I mean, for many, it will not be confusing. But the method used to score is just slightly more complex for the voter. And remember, we have voters who are not primarily English's speakers and of all different walks of life.
They might intuit it as being a ranked choice type situation, where each candidate must be assigned a different score. I mean - it is amazing how many deviations from intended use you will get. Any designer, implementor, or support person will know the headaches that a single degree of complexity can add. (And that is before the political talking heads get involved )
@@duncansiror5033 If you don't score one of the candidates, does it get removed from the sample size or does it automatically receive a score of zero?
@@Raphael11001 I'm almost certain it counts as zero
Thanks for the clear explanation! 😊
You never miss a beat! 🎉😊
Prior to watching this, Ranked Choice was my favorite, as it had the most manageable flaws. But STAR voting is definitely my favorite now, having learned about it. It's Ranked Choice but with better logistics.
As an Australian, I largely like preferential voting, but there’s been two problems I can identify. One is “preference harvesting” in upper house elections. This has been eliminated by getting rid of voting for one box above the line.
The other is “running dead”, where one major party tries to get fewer votes so that they can give their preference to an independent who will defeat the other major party candidate. A system rewarding such behaviour irks me.
Yes, the single "1" Above the Line was the worst thing that happened. I think it was NSW upper house that started it. They elect 21 state-wide candidates every four years. The election forms are enormous. You had to number every single box. Any error invalidated the whole paper. It was also difficult for the counters to actually count. So they brought in the ATL system, in effect a "standard numbering" for the whole of below the line. There was a recent NSW election with 346 candidates. Imagine how many spoiled votes there would have been without ATL.
But they let the parties decide the "standard numbering".
Micro parties worked out the "preference whispering" scheme. In last November's state election in Victoria this was still rampant. There are 8 upper house divisions, each with five members. Eight micro parties got together and allocated thier preferences in such a way that each of the eight parties would get one division where they would - after preference flows - get all of the votes from all eight parties. They all hoped it would be enough votes to win the fifth seat (maybe with some overflow votes from other candidates). This actually happened in Northern Metropolitan. Too bad for the voters and who they thought they were getting!
But the correct solution has now been put in place. The (Federal) Senate changed ATL so that a "1" just means "number all of the party in this column below the line from 1 to whatever, but no-one else". Then we can put "2", meaning "then number all of the party in this column", 3, 4, 5, etc all above the line. All multi-member elections do it this way now (except VIctoria state). We also no longer have to number every box below the line in any multi-member election. This elminates "Preference havesting", and might also eliminate "dead running"?
I think we have a pretty robust system in Australia with preferential voting. But I suspect New Zealand's multi-member proportional system (one vote for a local member, and one vote for a party) might be better (although I'd want to change the "local candidate" vote from plurality to preferential). I'd keep the Australian Senate system for multi-member elections.
i think that RCV strikes the best balance between accuratly reflecting peoples views and not being too complicated. The last NYC mayoral election was done via RCV and i had a much easier time explaining it to my elderly mom than a voting method where u have to score candidates. Ranking things is more intuitive than scoring things
Glad to hear it!
Agreed. I think the best system is one which is geared toward low information voters and one which is familiar to the general public. RCV may not strictly be the best if measured in a study, but we do not elect people in studies, we elect them in elections, which are messy. It may be much harder to even implement star voting compared to ranked choice voting. A less than perfect system is better than no system.
I live near a Mid-size city in Ohio. The Mayor and council candidates all run on a single non-partisan ballot in the primary election. There are 12 councilmen, 6 from districts and 6 at large. For the 6 At Large; in the primary the voters vote for 12 candidates. The top 12 run in the general election and the top 6 get elected to city council. It's similar for the mayoral race; all run in the primary and the top two, regardless of party affiliation run in the general election.
Since party affiliation doesn't mean a lot, the candidates need to run on issues and proposals. Many of them run as independents.
I'm not sure if this could be applied nationally or even statewide, but I would prefer that all candidates appear on a single primary ballot regardless of party using RCV or STAR.
I'm not on social media, so here's my vote:
Up until now Ranked Choice had been my favorite, but since you took more than a minute to more fully explain STAR, I think that's now my favorite since it allows for multiple candidates to be given the same score, while also being able to give people you want as far from office as possible a big bold *0.*
I really like STAR. It uses all the information you put on your ballot.
Ranked choice is so rad, makes my mouth water
Video idea:
Your top 10 favorite/least favorite Supreme Court decisions. If you want to narrow them down you can focus on the ones in your Supreme Court briefs!
Before watching, I like anything that's not winner-take-all. But I have a couple of favorites.
First, tiered representation. Every citizen is a tier-zero representative, and everyone can designate one person. For any N, a tier N representative becomes a tier N+1 designated by nine other tier N representatives. Laws can be passed by supermajority at any tier, with those made at lower tiers overruling those made at higher tiers if the laws conflict. This seems as though it would put a premium on organization, and lead to a coalition-of-coalitions political structure with many small political parties grouped into larger ones, culminating in one ruling coalition. The institutional structure would probably have a de-facto executive council as the highest level, whose members are chosen from among a de-facto legislature that's a bit more than ten times larger, and a combination of advisory body and de-facto standing constitutional convention that's something over a hundred times as large as the executive council. The barrier to entry at the bottom tiers would be extremely low: just get ten or a hundred citizens together and organize yourselves. The barrier would also be low for small parties to jump from one coalition to another.
Second, self-selected constituencies in place of geographic districts, with ordinary primaries and plurality general elections within each constituency. When you register to vote, or at any time up to a specified number of days before each election, you can choose which of your state's House seats you want to vote for. This seems as though it would lead to roughly proportional representation, with small parties encouraging their members to all register for the same seat, or the same few seats, however many they think they can get. At equilibrium, all constituencies would be about the same size (because it takes fewer people to win a smaller constituency, so those would be the ones that parties target to get their supporters to register into), and each seat would be contested by two parties with broadly similar views (because the Duverger's Law pattern would still apply somewhat within a constituency). It wouldn't do anything about the disproportional advantages of incumbency, though.
Majority (meaning instant-runoff) voting is an improvement over winner-take-all plurality, but probably not a big improvement. Multi-member super-districts would probably make more of a difference.
Now to see what the video has to say.
After watching, I'm kind of surprised that there's no mention of party-list proportional representation, or of instant-runoff voting where the candidate designates who their votes will go to if they're eliminated.
To me, it's more important to get rid of the winner-take-all part than the plurality-voting part.
What you are proposing are forms of what's called liquid democracy. It goes beyond just proportional representation in the legislature, and focuses on giving individual voters a direct line to decision-making. I am personally ambivalent toward it, though I could see it being useful for organizing a lower house in a bicameral legislature.
I prefer ranked choice voting, but the difference which I personally care more about is the winner-takes-all system. Some form of proportional representation would be far better for Congress, and for presidential elections of course you're voting for THE president so there can only be 1 winner, but due to the election being winner-takes-all at the state level, we've got cases like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton losing despite the majority of people voting for them. I realize that sounds like it only hurts democrats, but I feel like it also screwed the Republicans over in the election where Ross Perot did really well (which I think was 1992)
Came here to answer the question before watching: approval is best. Let's see if I need to change my answer after watching the video.
I didn't consider ballot tampering. That makes me think a bit. The best thing about approval is ease of use and familiarity. But if the only way to make it tamper proof is to force someone to mark "disapprove" for the remaining candidates, that throws ease of use out the window.
Technically ballots can be tampered in the current Plurality system. The difference is what happens afterwards: in Approval the vote is counted. In Plurality it is spoiled. I'm honestly not sure which is worse: In Approval, your ballot is guaranteed to be counted toward the candidates you voted for. But in Plurality, it is easier to catch. A solution could be to issue voters sets of matching bar-coded stickers to use instead of filling in bubbles. If the stickers on the ballot don't match, the problem can be caught. The glue on the stickers could also be dyed to make it harder for ballots to be tampered by removing stickers. This would be a beneficial security upgrade for all voting methods.
In Ireland we take ranked choice voting one step further (we call in single transferable vote). We have multiple seat constituencies with 3, 4 or 5 TDs (what we call MPs. This makes gerrymandering even harder as severely limiting the effectiveness of packing and splitting. The outcome of seats is very reflective of the vote.
MMP would probably get a similar or slightly more accurate seat to vote result but there are 2 reasons why I dislike MMP.
1) It makes political parties mandatory and they are a part of the process. I find parties policy tends to be decided by a few centre members and is forced on backbenchers or similar but not exactly confirming candidates. In my view this erodes debate and is anti-democratic.
2) Most MMP systems have a minimum seat threshold to gain access. This can be manipulated by autocrats to bar smaller opposition parties or repress minorities like in Turkey for example. A candidate that is extremely popular with a local issue could get the most votes of any politician but be rejected because he's not in a successful party.
The Irish system isn't perfect. No voting system can defeat stupid voting practices. We largely used to vote based on 1920s issues until 2011. Our system is slow to get results and forming a governing majority can be difficult.
Honestly though, the slow boring nature of the count prevents entertainment style politics and STV and multiparty constituencies help prevent (but not entirely stop) extreme candidates.
The RCV system in America has some serious problems because of being used for single winner elections. STV was never meant for single winners. It was created for proportional results in multi seat elections.
One notable thing about score voting is it rewards you for any positive publicity and punishes for negative publicity. Other voting systems (including approval!) often reward controversial figures since one side of the aisle are going to vote for them and the other side won't. This will also give a chance to the less known parties and candidates but may also skew the results towards them if voters other than those who like this fringe party pay no attention to it. Thus, this aspect of score voting, namely no publicity being better than negative publicity, may be a strength or a weakness, depending on your perspective
I’m surprised you didn’t include party list proportional representation as that is the most common type of voting system in Europe
I made this video primarily for Americans and what's most likely to happen at the state level.
For congressional offices that would make sense, but we’d need to change some federal and a lot of state laws to combine single-seat districts into multi-member offices. I think that should be a topic for a whole other video.
This is the first I have heard about star voting but a very vocal ranked choice voting advocate but this has me leaning towards star voting. Will have to look into it more. Thanks
I hadn't heard of STAR before, but it's now my favourite.
I live in MA and voted against ranked choice voting because I didn’t understand it. Thanks for explaining how it’s better than some, but not all systems.
The bottom line is, we gotta get rid of plurality voting.
@@iammrbeat if you’re for it I’m against it.
As for ranked choice voting: If A is everyones second choice but B gets 51% of first votes, I wouldn't say B is necessarily the supposed winner.
Yes, this is a very important point. The fact RCV only looks at #1 rankings easily misses cases where a better candidate is eliminated too early. Deeper down, this is actually a criticism of majority rule in general, and it's really a very glaring issue with it as a democratic principle, as a majority of preference is not the same thing as majority of support. Favoritism is not the same thing as support.
One of the best real life examples of Ranked voting is the one here in Australia. We call it Preferential voting.
In State and Federal voting we have the choice of voting 'above the line'
ie. I will choose the party that I want first, then second then third up to at least the 6th favourable parties: The party decides the next preferred party as per their 'How to Vote cards' provided at the polling place.
OR, I can choose to vote 'below the line' and choose at least 6 of MY best preferences OR I can choose EVERYONE I choose, from 1st to last (this can be a large number as a Federal Senate vote can have more than 30-40 people to choose from, some from a party and some independents). I like the idea that my vote will be counted and my preferences are respected, and I, and everyone else gets to do the same, even if I don't agree with their policies.
I also like the idea of compulsory voting here in Australia, as it gives a valid and accurate result with no ambiguity as to who wins and who loses. It is administered by an Independent body called The Australian Electoral Commission with no connection to ANY Political party or State.
We also don't vote for the leader of the country, as their role is to lead the party and not be able to overrun what the majority of the people in the party members want.
To explain, here is a TH-camr, David with the channel Auspol Explained which gives a very good demonstration of the process:
th-cam.com/video/TSGMBmJ0OlY/w-d-xo.html
The biggest problem with unconventional voting methods is the fact that perception of fairness in an election is arguably more important then fairness itself. By being more complex, unconventional voting methods reduce the perception of fair democracy, and make people feel like choosing leaders is a complex byzantine process that they don't understand.
Non of these are really taht complex though.
I mean many european countries have MMP systems that are all more complex than any mentioned here and they're fine.
I expect that after the first couple of elections, Americans would get used to it
Yeah. Complexity is a serious issue. That's why I support Approval voting - it uses the same ballots and machines as Plurality, and works roughly the same as a lot of school board and city council elections.
The thing I don't like about ranked choice voting (and other forms of voting) is that 50% isn't a majority. It's half. I don't want a winner who has slightly more than half of the vote to win. It's divided. A 70% vote would be better for an automatic winner. Also, the lack of keeping people who are "2nd best". If the top choices are divided by a majority of people but a candidate got more number 2 votes and the number 2 is liked (such as in STAR), then person should win. They got more votes overall then the top ones. It doesn't matter if they were the second choice, if a majority of people can agree on that candidate and not the others, then pick them.
STAR voting may be "best", but we have to do *something* to get rid of first-past-the-post. That seems to me to be ranked choice voting. But even RCV can be screwed up. For example, the ostensibly-RCV system adopted in Alaska for its primaries is a monstrosity that actually exacerbates the problems inherent in plurality voting.
Yeah, keep spreading the word. Most people don't understand RCV and think it makes it safe to honestly rank the candidates, so they like it based on a misundertanding.
If we're talking about elections with only a single winner then ranked choice is my fav with STAR and approval having uses in certain situations. However, when it comes to legislative elections, ranked choice is only a slight improvement as it lacks proportionality, which can only be achieved in multi-member districts. For that purpose, Single Transferrable Vote and Mixed Member Proportional are clearly the best choices.
I'm glad to see someone else shares my view of RCV for obtaining proportional results. It was never meant to be a single-winner method.
mr. beat is ranked #1 in our hearts.
The best way to vote nationally is when members of the parties elect the board members. First at a municipal level, then the representatives from the municipalities vote for district representatives, then state representatives and then finally these state representatives vote on what the federal politics of the party in question should be. That way anyone can become a high ranking member of a party without any money or class being involved. Then people would always know why they should vote for Democrats or Republicans, because they candidates from the party follow the same politics that have been created and refined by the members all the way down to the lowest level.
The earliest and later more famous party leaders of the Swedish social democrats were many times aristrocrats from wealthy families, but their fight for the working Joes of the nation allowed Göran Persson (who grew up in poverty) to become prime minister 1996-2006. Olof Palme was from a wealthy family, but he is by far the most acclaimed and famous Swedish social democrat.
Even approval voting seems like it’d be a meaningful upgrade over the current plurality method, and approval looks wimpy and ineffective next to the rest of the options outlined here.
This needs to change!
Yep, they are all so much better than what we got now
I prefer the Copeland method, and even better, the ranked pairs method. Both are methods with ranking, but they do still work if voters are allowed to give candidates the same rank. In the Copeland method, candidates face off head to head in a round robin where the winner gets one point and both candidates get 1/2 in a tie. The improved version is ranked pairs, where any loop in which each candidate beats the following one in a cycle, the win in the cycle with the least margin of victory is removed. This gives meaning to all of the results. These follow the condorcet criterion, which states that if one candidate is preferred by a majority to each of the other candidates, they win (unlike all other methods mentioned in the video). It satisfies the smith criterion, which is that it selects a candidate in the smallest set of candidates that are each preferred by a majority to each outside the set (known as the smith set). It satisfies smith iia, which is that the candidates outside the smith set don’t affect the winner. It satisfies monotonicity, so an increase in support will not result in a loss. Ranked pairs also satisfies clone-proof, which is that a candidate cannot cause themselves to win by being duplicated on the ballot, which could be a major party strategy if it didn’t satisfy the requirement. There is pretty much no better method than ranked pairs that satisfies condorcet. Ones that are equally good generally are where you find the smith set and do some sort of tiebreak. Also, median score voting can work a bit better than mean score voting because it makes people less incentivized to be as extreme as possible to get a candidate they at least kind of approve of, which is why mean score voting with good strategy can often turn into something closer to approval voting. I hope this was helpful and interesting
A simple fix for score voting regarding low turnout is to use the sum by itself instead of the average. Ultimately, I think that assembling people at random would be more beneficial than any voting method because politicians wouldn’t be able to afford ignoring the minority (sometimes minorities get lucky), the voters would be able to meet the candidates, money for advertising and debates would be unnecessary, and it’d be easier to make hundreds of people to research the candidates properly than to make the whole population do so.
Thank you for bringing this up!
Electoral College version 2.0, now with random electors!
Yes. The argument for the "unknown candidate with high average" is really disingenuous because this is not the version of score voting anyone is seriously promoting.
@@pascalausensi9592 Random electorates run the risk of giving power to people like Nazis every once in a while. In the House of Representatives, this isn't a real concern because individual representatives have little power especially new guys. However, it would be a concern for the Presidency, so I think that the eligible pool should be restricted a bit both for security and professionalism.
That's what STAR actually does.
Never heard of Star voting but I’ll choose that over whatever we have now.
There are other options like the one comment I read where A vs B/C/D, B vs A/C/D, C vs A/B/D, and D vs A/B/C.
I like that head to head match ups and see which is the better candidate.
I’ll choose that one.
I think one glaring problem with Star Voting is that it incentivizes strategic voting. So it will eventually devolve into the voters giving their preferred candidate(s) the highest score and all the other candidates the lowest score to bring down their average as much as possible. This is basically plurality voting, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Note that this doesn't happen with approval voting because there's no way for the voters to "harm" non-preferred candidates so there's no need to strategize. Just vote for everyone you like without worrying.
It's also not a problem with ranked choice because ranking the other candidates lower doesn't "harm" them so once again, there's no need to strategize.
I don't see how STAR encourages that any more or less than Approval. You can do STAR using totals instead of averages, and the final results don't change as long as no one abstains (or abstains are treated as 0). Likewise you can use "averages" for Approval, which is basically an approval rating ("X% of voters approved candidate A")
However, I don't think it causes them to decay into Plurality. For one, if they give multiple candidate the max score and everyone else the min in STAR, then it'd decay into Approval, not Plurality, which you seem to think is OK. While if people only gave max to _one_ and none to anyone else, then yes, it'd be like Plurality, in either STAR or Approval.
But that isn't a good strategy either. After all, it'd actually be like _perfectly honest_ Plurality in that case. It'd be just as unstrategic as perfect honesty in Plurality, for all the same reasons.
Consider if your know your favorite isn't very popular. If you support only them you'll be throwing your vote away again. But you have a front-runner compromise who might win, but could benefit from your support. So you should support them too.
In generally, supporting more candidates does decrease the chances that any _specific_ one will win, but in increases the chances that _at least_ one will win over those you dislike even more. In fact, if you're mostly voting _against_ a particular candidate, then you could give maximum support to everyone _except_ them. After all, giving only your favorite max support any nothing to anyone else doesn't actually make it similar to Plurality _as it it actually practiced,_ it makes it like _perfectly honest plurality voting,_ which is just as unstrategic in all the same ways and for all the same reasons.
It's also not technically true that ranked-choice there's never a reason to strategize. It's true that later rankings can't harm those ranked earlier, but that's not enough to make something strategy proof; in fact it turns out to be impossible to make a method strategy proof, check out Arrow's Theorem, and Gibbard's Theorem. For examples of RCV's vulnerabilities, you can look up Favorite Betrayal and Non-Monotonicity.
Arguably actually taking advantage of these might not be feasible in most cases under RCV. But I don't think strategic vulnerability alone is enough to determine the best method. RCV is also "vulnerable" to vote splitting and the center squeeze effect, even if everyone is honest. Ultimately RCV is basically just Plurality which uses an iterative heuristic to automatically be strategic on the voter's behalf. Unfortunately this seems to make it similar enough that it still encourages two-faction domination, and almost everything behaves the same as normal Plurality when there are only two strong options
@@MustSeto "You can do STAR using totals instead of averages"
-I wasn't aware of that since it wasn't mentioned in the video. However, my original point still stands for Star voting using averages.
" if they give multiple candidate the max score and everyone else the min in STAR, then it'd decay into Approval, not Plurality"
-I don't think so. In star voting using averages, gaming the system provides a significant boost to the candidate promoting it. Which means all candidates will be incentivized to ask their voters to do so. The main selling point of star voting is getting information about the voters' other preferences beside the first but gaming the system essentially negates this, which is why the devolution into plurality occurs, with the two most popular candidates' voters basically being able to stifle everyone else.
"not Plurality, which you seem to think is OK"
-I never said that. I just said that this problem doesn't occur with approval and ranked choice.
"Consider if your know your favorite isn't very popular"
-Not being popular means the candidate has fewer voters and thus is very susceptible to the popular candidate's voters gaming the system by virtue of sheer numbers. You will know this and thus will have to adjust accordingly. This is the problem with plurality voting. You shouldn't have to strategize based on how other people will vote.
"But I don't think strategic vulnerability alone is enough to determine the best method"
-"Arguably actually taking advantage of these might not be feasible in most cases under RCV" You answered yourself. We're not looking for a perfect system, which, as you pointed out, doesn't exist. We're looking for the system with the fewest problems, at least practically speaking. 😀
@@feynstein1004 STAR voting using averages where no one uses blanks only makes it closer to STAR without using averages (Average-STAR and Total-STAR are equivalent if no one uses blanks). If you don't think Total-STAR would decay into Plurality, then you shouldn't think Average-STAR where people are convinced not to use averages does either
Even Approval is actually a form of Score voting where there's only two possible scores, 0 and 1, and no averaging. STAR is just Score with an automatic runoff step at the end, but if there are only two possible scores it can't change anything either. So if voters only use two scores and don't use blanks, then STAR is equivalent to Approval. Not using blanks in STAR only makes it closer to Approval
BTW, although strategic voting in Score would cause it to decay into Approval with enough of it, that isn't actually strategic in STAR with more possible scores due to the runoff step
If someone convinces you to give the minimum score to someone you would have given a blank in STAR, then you would disapprove of them in Approval. The only other thing you can do if it's Approval is approve of them, but if you would approve of them, then giving them the minimum score would not be strategic in STAR. It'd be better to give them at least some points. So even if candidates can convince you not to use a _blank,_ they should not be able to convince you to give a _minimum score_ unless they'd also be able to convince you to disapprove of them in Approval
> I never said that.
To be clear I never meant that you thought any form of Plurality was ok, I was saying you seemed to think Approval was relatively ok because you don't think it decays into Plurality. Is that not right either?
> You answered yourself.
What do you mean? I'm saying it's possible for a method to be bad even if it isn't meaningfully vulnerable to strategy, and that RCV might fall into that category for counter-intuitive reasons, and may in fact have nearly all the same problems as Plurality
That being said, I have seen arguments that, although strategy might not usually be a problem in RCV elections, it can be a problem in certain key situations which might help enforce duopoly even more, as it naturally becomes more likely as third parties grow. I don't know exactly how often it would happen, and it could be that the other factors I mentioned encourage duopoly enough that it rarely gets that far, especially after an adjustment period when people get used to the method. It did happen just recently in Alaska the first time it was ever tried there though.
The thing about Star voting is that you have no power during the runoff phase if you scored both candidates the same. So you have an incentive to use the full range of scores.
That is a great point
The criticism of approval voting being easy for a poll counter to mess up by filling in extra bubbles is trivially easy to address. Just have people fill in "approve" or "disapprove" for each candidate. It's no harder to mess up than our current voting system.
To those who like Ranked-Choice Voting, consider finding a non-partisan advocacy group advocating for RCV in your state. In NJ, for example, we have Voter Choice NJ (which full disclosure I am apart of).
Good advice, Jack
I’m already apart of a group in California to help expand this voting method all across the golden state. It’s called the Cal RCV coalition. So anyone that lives in California help us bring ranked choice voting to our state.
@@theyoungcentrist9110 would you know of similar orgs in the other states by chance?
@@tomrogue13 In Georgia, there is another advocacy group know as Better Ballot Georgia to bring RCV to the peach state.
Great video. It's nice to see fans of different election systems getting along. A couple years away it was getting VICIOUS between the star people and the RCV people.
my favorite system is to combine RCV with multi-winner districts. because that is the best way actually breaking up the 2-party system and get more political parties.
Still viciously against RCV (a.k.a. iterated plurality).
How about a system where ballots do NOT show the party, only the candidate names. Voters might actually have to know what candidates stood for.
That could certainly help reduce party-line voting. But we’d also need to ensure that all registered voters receive sample ballots and information about who’s going to be on them well in advance of the election so people have time to find out the candidates’ positions on issues they care about.
Mixed member proportional, but further, for the districts instead of the usual FPTP, use a multi member district with STV
15:12 not sure if this map is accurate, I believe Nevada passed in a 2022 referendum of an augmented version of Alaska’s system (top 5 general instead of Alaska’s top 4). Correct me if I’m wrong, thanks for your videos!!
The reason I go with Approval Voting, is that it's SUPER easy to incorporate it. Same voting machines. Same ballots, just different instructions. You can get most of the benefits without changing the whole system to a more complex, or confusing system.
Overall... great analysis on all of this. I don't disagree with any of the assessments... but I REALLY think Approval Voting- with it's simplicity, and cheap and easy incorporation from our current systems, is the way to go.
The STAR Voting campaign will be starting a petition this summer to get this system back on the Oregon ballot for next year’s election! The last time it came up it was only defeated by a small margin; hopefully this time around more people will be aware of the awfulness of plurality voting and vote for change.
My cover band and I have tried everything to vote on songs. Score voting has worked best for us!
How do you know it worked best? Did you guys vote on that?
Probably works well with a small group of people, it wouldn't scale up well.
I think showing alternative voting system is really important, but there is still a massive amount of systems missing. All these system assume, that voting for individual candidates needs to be fair, however most western democracies either have a system where voters vote for parties (an organization created by multiple candidates based of similar interests), a system where it is possible to vote for a candidate AND a party (like Germany or New Zealand) or a system where people can vote for a party, or a candidate in your district (Denmark).
I honestly believe the Danish system is far superior to any candidate voting system, as party groups are fairly represented based on the number of votes they got, parties are naturally forced to form coalitions with others and the people that want can still vote for an individual candidate (it's a problem that in the U.S. people just cannot vote for an entire party that is closer to their ideology).
Right on. I'll admit this video is VERY American-centric. I hope to explore the Danish system in a future video.
@@iammrbeat I wouldn't call it America-centric. That's like saying, this video is Irish centric, because Ireland uses STV. Most election systems work the same in different countries and I believe the systems I named would actually benefit the U.S..
@@lllluka Gonna be honest, I feel like you are too harsh on political parties. There is a reason why many candidates choose political parties.
1. They are still broadly alligned with the goals of the party. You probably have preconceptions about what the parties stand for, while you ignore them on a personal level.
2. Voting for a person is never a long term solution. I would actually personally not vote for independents on principal, as I don't believe they are able to communicate their ideas with similar minded other politicians. I don't want to vote for someone I personally like, but that is not able to have "successors" from a party and has passed away when I am 40.
3.
I support a proportional representation without any electoral threshold and compensation seats for full proportionality. In that system a large number of political parties will be presented (even more than in Finland).
4.
Feels a bit ironic that you would vote for a person and can't even get on board with their reasons to join a party.
5.
Having independent candidates is completely intransparent to overall voters. Having organized groups makes it easier for voters to understand ideologies of different parties. If there are 10 independent candidates in every electorate, almost nobody would have to time to look into all electoral programs. Also independent candidates may not be an option in your region, if they are running in another part of the country.
@@lllluka While the Irish system is better than many others, it again leads to unproportionality of the result.
@@lllluka Yes, but politics is never a one person show groups of individuals work with each other. In an electoral system like the Dutch one it is very easy to form new political parties, that can still be representeted, if they get a very low amount of votes. If these candidates are really that different from their parties as you think, they have the freedom to form their own parties.
I also like a variety of candidates from different political parties and voted for a party that has members I believe are horrible, but that doesn't make me complain against the functions of parties lol
I have come to the conclusion after now watching 15 of Mr. Beat's videos that he is a dork - but a likeable one. Thanks for the content, and for approaching politics and economics from a more pragmatic lens.
as a political scientist a YouGov sponsor is such a flex
lol yeah it was a good fit
Of these four, AV / alternative vote (what is here called ranked choice) is obviously the best. Approval isn’t giving you enough data to run an election while any system based on an averaged score is awful for two reasons not mentioned in the video.
First, because they’re based on averages, they don’t promote consensus - a divisive candidate with fanatic support and fanatic hate (10 5 star votes and 10 1 star votes) has the same average as a consensus candidate with 20 3 star votes.
Second, and much more complexly, what do you do when people don’t rank all candidates? With AV, voters can stop scoring when they no longer care, if for example they think all the remaining candidates are equally bad. What happens under an averages system if a voter declines to give a rating to a certain candidate? If they’re not counted in the average then a candidate who no one knows, and therefore few people actually rank, but for whom the few people who do know them love them could end up with a crazy high average (they only get 5 votes including their own but every vote is 5 star, for example) and get into the run-off. If that happens, how do you do the run off? Only count the ballots where people voted for both candidates - thereby ignoring the vast majority of ballots (and by the same metric as above probably lead to the unknown winning)? What happens if the run off ends up being between two of these candidates? You’re actually incentivising being unknown. Or do you decide that every non-ranked candidate on the ballot will get a standard ranking. If so, what ranking? Maybe 3, arguing that an unranked candidate is neutral to the voter? Or maybe 1, arguing that the voter must hate a candidate so much that they couldn’t bring themselves to rank them at all? Or another number? Whichever you choose will be hugely impactful on the outcome but has nothing to do with what is actually in the ballot, allowing the same collection of ballots to give different outcomes depending on the choice of election officials, a thing you generally want to avoid in democratic elections.
Star voting is my favorite. I think the only drawback is that some voters will claim its multistep method is somehow unfair.
Also it's multiple steps could/would lead to many/more charges od voter fraud. We know who would cry the loudest about that!
@@celiabrickell2500How so? It's exactly the same ballots. There aren't two elections, people cast the ballots just once.
@@celiabrickell2500 STAR still uses fewer rounds than RCV and produces more justifiable results. So the magnitude of any backlash against STAR on the grounds of fraud will be very mild by comparison.
Weighted Average voting is the best! Everyone gives a grade (ex. 0-5 w/ 5 being best) to all eligible candidates. Then the average grade for any given candidate is multiplied by the percentage of voters who gave them a positive score (1-5).
Ex. - A candidate’s average score is 4.5 but only 82% of people voted positively for them. 4.5*82%=3.69 weighted average. The candidate with the highest weighted average wins.
Weighted average voting encourages everyone to vote exactly how they feel about the candidates and selects the most generally liked candidate. Not enough votes - can’t win; too polarizing - can’t win. Weighted average voting selects the candidate that is most acceptable/liked by most people.
I'm gonna mention Single Transferable Vote here, as used in Ireland and a few other places - basically Ranked Choice Voting but with multiple seats, which allows for some proportionality and makes it a good bit harder to Gerrymander.
Like, people say it's a complicated voting method - but ngl, I found all the voting methods listed here besides Ranking Choice voting even more complicated!
STV is a form of RCV!
@@iammrbeat I mean, yeah, but having multi-seat constituencies completely changes things - if Utah elected their 4 congresspeople by straight RCV in 2022, the results would pretty much be the same. But if they elected all 4 in a single 4-seat constituency, the Democrats would have got enough votes to virtually guarantee a minimum of one seat.
I'm pretty sure you could find a counter-example in a Blue state where Republicans would benefit, but STV would exponetially increase the odds that voters in almost every district in the US would have at least one local representative that represents their views, even in solid red or blue states.
OK, tbh there is one district in Utah that generally was competitive enough, but what STV would mean is that you wpuldn't get the situation that the large minority of Democrats in Utah (or insert Republicans-in-Blue-State counter-exampke here) wouldn't be relying on a nail-biting contest in one particular district to get any representation on a congressional level.
I certainly find STV based on multi-member regions stronger than systems like MMP - the biggest argument for single member plurality is the "local rep" - STV means while you might cover a larger geographic region, you're more likely to have someone somewhat local who represents your interests.
Plus it also has the democratic benefits of not just filling out positions of a chamber with a closed list of losers, but everyone has to actually win enough votes to reach the quota to get in.
I feel that is also a good balance against some fully proportional systems where 1 or 2% of the vote can get someone in - or the common solution to that in places like NZ where there's a threshold, meaning many wasted votes on smaller parties, rather than in STV where those could just flow as preferences.
@@iammrbeat RCV as most people know it is properly known as IRV or "Instant runoff voting". I really dislike how one ranked method has come to be marketed (yes, marketed) as the default ranked system, when there are so many ranked methods out there. STV came before IRV, and IRV is a form of STV. STV is not a form of IRV.
I have to admit I never heard of STAR voting system, but now I agree with you that it is slightly better then Ranked, which was may favorite before this.
I learned something new today. Thanks!
My initial vote would be ranked choice voting. After watching this video i think I’m on the fence with that and star voting.
There’d be a huge learning curve to implement it but from what I understand it sounds promising
Personally, i don't think that STAR eliminates the downsides of Score voting sufficiently for me to rank it above RCV.
Ranked choice voting may be the easiest to implement at the moment, based on familiarity. But star voting may be the way to go, especially after your analysis of it. Beat.
One things for sure, however.
Any other voting method would be an improvement over plurality voting.
Aloha 🤙🏼
My favourite is actually single transferable vote
It's a form of RCV. I think most people would agree with you.
Living in Australia where we have had Ranked Choice Voting* for 100 years I would say:
I think it's a shame how little focus proportional representation has in US election reform discussion!
I think a good system for the USA would be to have all elections be optional preferential voting (you must vote for 1 candidate as a 1st preference and may list a 2nd, 3rd, etc if you wish).
Counted using RCV* when that election is constrained in some way to have to be a single winner election (president, federal senator, governor, etc.) but counted as Single Transferable Vote in other context where it could be a multi winner election (federal HoR, state HoR, state senate, etc.)
Every voter would only have to learn one new way of filling out a ballot and you'd improve all of the elections in the country.
*In Australia we don't call it Ranked Choice Voting but Instant Runoff Voting because that's what it is.
Yes - STAR Voting method is great: it is accurate, simple, expressive, and what's most important - it eliminates vote splitting ("Spoiler Effect").
Additionally, I like being able to assign the same score to two or more candidates.
STAR is awesome!
Mixed Member Proprtional representation (MMP) with Ranked choice for the directly elected memebers is the best votong system in my opinion. Its acknowleges parties as a major part of the political system and gives you one vote for a party that determins the makeip of parliment and one vote for a local canidate ensureing everyone has at least one representive in parliment. We use MMP with FPTP in Germany and I like it a lot. Our policits is heavyly build on consensus. The political devisions ate real but not to bad, espically compared to thr US or Brazil. However think it be even better with Ranked choice voting sincr it would ensure more consensus for the directly elected memebers.
Where I'm from (Ireland), we have ranked voting, but for multi-seat constituencies. I think the multi-seat vs single-seat element is important. Multi-seat seems (i.e. I'm saying this without any study on the topic) to avoid the binary choices that the USA and even the UK seem to suffer from, and helps make everyone's voice count in the way ranked is supposed to.
For example, my home 4 seat county typically ends up with 1 seat to big centre-right party A, 1 seat to big centrist party B, 1 independent and 1 seat to any of of A/B/left-leaning party.
Of course, electing useless politicians knows no borders and surmounts all voting systems.
Yup! In NJ we want to use RCV for our positions that have to be single-seat, but for our assembly, we want to use STV.
Yeah I don't think the method of runoffs used in RCV is great for single seats. It was meant to achieve proportionality in multi-winner elections, not select single winners.
As a resident of Tasmania, Australia I very much like the Hare-Clark method of voting that is used in lower house elections in the state. :)
when I first heard about ranked choice voting without hearing how it was going to be implemented specifically, I imagined that it was going to be something like score voting. Thanks for the video! Now I know I support score and star voting over RCV
edit: did the people who voted in this video actually understand the other options or did they just go for RCV just because they know it lol
In the request, they were supposed to be familiar with them or, if not, watch the respective videos he made for them.