Comment by AnthonyMouse
12 hours ago
> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.
I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party system. Whereas score makes it clear something's different but still only takes ten seconds to explain ("rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10").
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.
Tribalism. People convince themselves that both options are bad but one is worse and then fight their own brothers who picked the other one.
But the lesser of evils is still evil and the ability to change your vote to the other team is the only leverage you have against either of them, so what happens if you relinquish it?
Given a decision between the devil you know and the devil you don't, choose the one that you have not tried.
To be clear, I strongly prefer STAR, but approval is the "good enough" where I'd shut up other than nerdy nit-picky conversations (which I enjoy as much as any other nerd). Approval seems to work out well enough in practice (hell, it's how most people figure out where to eat and even HN is some mixture of Approval and 3-2-1 if you can downvote lol).
The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.
But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]
But that's kinda my point. With the example of my parents we can agree that it is a choice between two evils but then they cannot understand how I say I hold my nose while begrudgingly choosing one rather than vote with full devotion. In reality that means one of us doesn't actually believe in a choice between the lesser of two evils[1]. They claim this, but don't act on it. I think this is strikingly common.
That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225341
[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.
Duverger’s law: first past the post results in two party system.
Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.