this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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As you said, STAR is arguably better in some ways but Approval being dead simple to explain to people and technically already supported by existing voting machines is worth a whole lot on its own as far as being a good voting system.
Try explaining STAR or Approval to someone who is only familiar with FPTP, see which one they understand more quickly.
Because "Vote for everyone you're OK with winning the office and it counts as a vote for any of them, whoever gets the most votes wins" or "It's just like what we've been doing, but you can pick more than one person and your vote counts for all of them" explains Approval voting.
As opposed to having to do a cumulative total across all ballots to figure out if your ballot counts as a vote at all, before figuring out whether your vote actually counts as a vote for someone you voted 5 for or someone you voted 2 for.
There is an argument for simplicity, but if we're going to change things, we might as well try for the experimentally best option.
That's fair. I just think being able to sell people on it is a high value part of any solution, and any system where you can't know how your vote will be counted until you count all the other votes is necessarily a harder sell. As is any system where they will have to do something radically different.
Two rounds of counting. It's more of a feature. Think of it as an automatic recount.
As to knowing who wins. Well, that's always the rub. There is no system that lets you know who wins before all the counting is done.
Not knowing who wins, but knowing who your ballot will be counted as a vote for in the end. The answer is you can't know and it might just be tossed as no vote depending on how everyone else votes.
Imagine we've moved to STAR and leading up to the first STAR election for President someone asks you how to be sure their ballot will in the end be counted as a vote for Jill Stein. The answer is that you can't, because until every other ballot is counted it's impossible to know if any ballots at all can be counted as ballots for Jill Stein in the end. Let alone trying to report on the count as it happens in a coherent way your grandparents might understand.
Mathematically it's great, but it fails at being easy to explain, easy to implement, and easy to report on. Especially to people used to FPTP. It fails in the parts that it needs to most succeed at socially to be a viable option to see adoption.