I agree it’s a flaw, but the answer isn’t to move to an even worse and more gameable system, it’s to move to proportional systems like MMP.
Cardinal voting systems are terrible because strategic voting is as trivial as it is in FPTP. In IRV situations where strategic voting would be possible exist, but they’re rare and hard to predict. In cardinal systems it’s always best to give the maximum score or the minimum score, and never anything in between.
glaber@lemm.ee 1 day ago
And when that happens it just defaults to approval, which is still non-monotonic and better than IRV, but it’s been proven anyway that that doesn’t happen and most people are honest (or would learn to be honest after few iterations). IRV is also not devoid of strategy, as it can be better to rank your true favourite lower
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 day ago
I think you missed the part where I said that it can happen, but that it’s rare and hard to predict.
Approval Voting is bad because of the simple fact that it doesn’t let you express any preference. There’s no ability to say “I’ll take this guy if I really have to, to avoid the worst outcome, but if possible I would much prefer this other guy”. In single-winner systems, having some mechanism to express that one candidate is better than another is absolutely crucial.
glaber@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Yea, sorry, my wording wasn’t the clearest. I meant to say that it is actually not that rare, and hoped that the linked source would help support that claim. From the same website:
I agree and that’s why I support Score Voting over it! The mechanism to express that one candidate is better than another one is to just give them honest scores! And there’s studies proving that’s the reality is, the vast majority of people are at least somewhat honest when filling out a Score ballot
Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 day ago
Cardinal systems devolve into approval, and approval doesn’t allow expressing preference. And being unable to express preference lends itself to some of the worst strategic voting and reintroduces the spoiler effect in the place it’s most important to avoid the spoiler effect: serious 3-(or more-)way races. If I’m an A voter, B is centrist, and C is worst, then under approval it’s fine for me to approve of A and B if I know A can’t win. But the moment A is a serious contender, choosing to approve of B decreases the chance A might win. But not approving of B increases the chance C might win. I’m stuck with having to make a terrible decision.
Ordinal systems don’t do this. Some ordinal systems might be better than IRV and avoid the biggest criticisms of that system, but ordinal systems beat cardinal systems nearly every time.
But the main thing about all of this is that every single-winner system is always worse than proportional multi-winner systems. Moving to any system other than FPTP should be the first priority, but if you’re going to spend time knocking down suggestions to improve to the most well-proven alternative, you might as well go all the way and advocate MMP or direct proportional, and on shoring up some of the weaknesses of that system (such as problems with party lists letting parties choose who gets in even if people don’t like the candidate of the party they like, or how minimum thresholds can lead to some people’s votes being effectively wasted).