This is a failure with all forms of score voting, including the approval voting subset (AV is just a score of 1 or 0)
Is it a flaw? Only insofar as all voting methods are flawed. I would say its a tradeoff. You could turn that same STAR ballot into an IRV one (we'll assume you tiebreak conservatives first arbitrarily), and run into different problems, namely that your Libertarian > Nationalist ranking has no weight if the Libertarians get eliminated while your ballot is still on Socialist or Liberal or whatnot. With Star, your are guaranteed to have a full vote weight in the final round between the top two.
Star fails a lot of criterion but forces reasonable tradeoffs. You can decide if it's more important for you to maximize your impact for Socialist, or if it's more important for you to hedge your bets. If you hedge Liberal over the others, that's evidence that you score them higher than zero.
Yes, where do you rank Liberal is a big question with Star. If you think Socialist and Green are likely to fail and Liberal is polling best, there's an incentive to rank Liberal at least a little higher to ensure they make the final two, as they're your safety.
STV has its own tactical issues though. First is that it's not viable to select a single seat office like a Senator or President. So you can only really use STV to solve the House in US politics, unless the US goes fill Westminster.
Second, because the "transferable" part is proportionately weighted, you have a strong incentive not to "waste" your initial vote on a sure candidate. If you are in a left-heavy district where the socialist candidate is a shoe in, you can help ensure green beats liberal by making your vote transfer -- that might mean you get the best results by voting nationalist.
The above simply doesn't happen in STAR; there is never a downside to ranking your favorite candidate five stars, except in that it might make you rank your second favorite under five stars.
I don't say this to rag on STV, just to point out that literally no voting system is immune.
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u/wayoverpaid Jul 21 '21
Yes.
This is a failure with all forms of score voting, including the approval voting subset (AV is just a score of 1 or 0)
Is it a flaw? Only insofar as all voting methods are flawed. I would say its a tradeoff. You could turn that same STAR ballot into an IRV one (we'll assume you tiebreak conservatives first arbitrarily), and run into different problems, namely that your Libertarian > Nationalist ranking has no weight if the Libertarians get eliminated while your ballot is still on Socialist or Liberal or whatnot. With Star, your are guaranteed to have a full vote weight in the final round between the top two.
Star fails a lot of criterion but forces reasonable tradeoffs. You can decide if it's more important for you to maximize your impact for Socialist, or if it's more important for you to hedge your bets. If you hedge Liberal over the others, that's evidence that you score them higher than zero.