Technically Exists

An apology

2023-04-01

I’m writing this post today to apologize for my past behavior. Ever since this blog existed, I’ve published an April Fools’ Day post each year about some topic or other that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. However, it has been brought to my attention that not only do these posts fail to be humorous, they also degrade the seriousness of both the topics they cover and the blogosphere as a whole, in a way that can be quite dangerous.

Take, for example, On normative ethical theories. This post touches on a very serious philosophical topic, but its content is one gag applied repeatedly to different ethical theories to supposedly convert them into the dangerous position known as utilitarianism. In reality, this gag effectively ignored all but one aspect of these ethical theories in order to hide their obvious superiority behind silly revisions, thus promoting the insidious utilitarian position in their place.

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Why I like STAR voting: winner selection

2023-03-30

This blog post is the fourth in a series of posts about STAR voting. If you haven’t read the previous entries, I recommend you start with the first entry before reading this one.

Previously I explained the importance of pre-election polls and the advantages that STAR polls have over other types of polls. I mentioned at the end that many of the properties that make STAR a good method for polling also make it a good method for choosing winners, and in this post I will justify the claim that STAR voting picks good winners. But first, we’ll have to discuss what it even means for a winner to be good in the context of single-winner elections. There are two major schools of thought on this, majoritarianism and utilitarianism, and I will start with the former.

Majoritarianism says that a candidate is good if they are preferred by over half of the voters, i.e. if they have majority support. This sounds pretty straightforward until you consider just what it means to be supported by a voter. Does being supported mean being that voter’s first choice? If so, then it’s impossible to guarantee a majority winner, and most competitive elections with more than two candidates—the elections where the choice of voting method matters most—won’t have a majority winner. Thus, most majoritarians turn to the notion of a pairwise majority instead.

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Why I like STAR voting: BRANDING

2022-04-01

I’ve discussed how STAR voting is simple, how its ballot design is superb, and how it leads to better pre-election polling. But in this post I will cover what is by far the most important aspect of this bright idea: BRANDING.

Once upon a time, there was a voting method called score-runoff voting. It was a pretty good voting method, all things considered. It produced very accurate results when tested, and its hybrid nature seemed like it might have the potential to unite the voting reform movement behind it. But there was one major problem: its name sucked.

To be fair, this is true for most voting methods. But it doesn’t have to be. Using the revolutionary technique of BRANDING, the uninspiring score-runoff voting method became the illustrious STAR voting method that you know and love. BRANDING stands for Beguiling Relatable Advertisement Notably Demands Increases in Noticed Greatness, and that’s exactly how it works. The name of the voting method itself becomes a persuasive advertisement that relates the method to the great things that voters already know about, and in doing so, it highlights those positive traits and focuses the attention on them.

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Why I like STAR voting: pre-election polls

2021-06-29

This blog post is the third in a series of posts about STAR voting. If you haven’t read the previous entries, I recommend you start with the first entry before reading this one.

Last post I explained why the 5-star ballot format used by STAR voting is superior to other commonly proposed ballot formats. In this post I’ll explain how the ballot format and voting method can be adapted for use in pre-election polls, and I’ll go over the advantages of doing so. At the time of writing no one has ever conducted a STAR voting pre-election poll, and neither the Equal Vote Coalition nor STAR Voting Action have set a standard for how this would be done. However, there is a straightforward means of transforming the STAR voting method into a pre-election poll method, and it’s this polling method that I’ll be discussing here.

A STAR voting pre-election poll, or STAR poll for short, begins by having poll respondents rate the candidates using the same 0-5 scale that STAR voting uses. Once all responses have been collected, the poll results can be calculated. These results consist of two parts. The first is the average score of each candidate. While STAR voting uses total scores to determine the finalists, it makes more sense to report average scores since they are independent of the number of respondents. This is analogous to how single-choice plurality voting elects the candidate with the greatest total number of votes, but poll and election results are commonly reported as percentages rather than totals.

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Why I like STAR voting: the 5-star ballot

2021-06-06

This blog post is the second in a series of posts about STAR voting. If you haven’t read the previous entry, I recommend you do so before starting this one.

In the previous post I made the case that STAR voting is simple enough to be a viable option for voting method reform, but I didn’t explain why STAR voting would be worth adopting. I want to start that explanation by talking about the ballot type that STAR voting uses. Often referred to as “the 5-star ballot”, it is a rated ballot with a scale of 0-5. This means that unlike with RCV ballots, you are free to rate candidates equally and to skip ratings as you like.

STAR ballot

An example STAR ballot

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