To clarify, I never intended that as a defence of FPTP. It's awful and I'll take any of the systems being discussed here over it. It was a statement specifically towards IRV over score/approval.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
it's not even close.
Score voting calls for ambiguous, proven-to-be-culturally-variable ratings that have no natural relationship to preferences (and approval does the same thing in an opposite way, while score voting relies on ambiguous distinctions that don’t have a clear mapping from actual preferences, approval forces voters to rank with artificial ties that don’t have a clear mapping to actual preferences); most metrics simply do not reflect this because they have no mechanism to.
Where these problems don’t apply, as is the case many places outside of secret ballots for elections of public officers, score and approval can be great. E.g., open ballot approval on a choice of a group activity where voting “approve” is a commitment to participate if the selected option wins makes perfect sense, or open-ballot score voting where the given score is a commitment to provide some quantity of resources proportional to the score to the common effort if the item given that score wins. Then the ratings given are tied to concrete differences in preferences.
(On the other hand, choosing between single-winner ballot methods is mostly a waste of time regardless of the abstract merits of the particular system; the most significant difference within democratic systems in quality of government by popular engagement, popular satisfaction with government, and a number of other measures is with the degree of proportionality of the main legislative body, and no single-winner system is going to deliver much of an improvement there, you need a system designed for proportionality, which means multimember districts on some level.)
utter nonsense. the scores are just normalized utilities.
or, if you're being strategic, you're just min-maxing based on expected utility. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
> (and approval does the same thing in an opposite way
utter nonsense. approval voting is just a binary 0-1 scale instead of e.g. 0-5. the math in no way changes.
> while score voting relies on ambiguous distinctions that don’t have a clear mapping from actual preferences
utterly false. there is nothing "ambiguous" whatsoever.
> approval forces voters to rank with artificial ties that don’t have a clear mapping to actual preferences
of course it has a mapping to actual preferences. what you're _trying_ to say is that the transform from utilities ("preferences") to scores is LOSSY. the problem is that transforming to ordinal rankings is even MORE lossy, and this is why approval voting still outperforms ranked methods in general, especially with strategic voting taken into account.
we have several pages explaining this common myth to laypersons.
https://medium.com/@clayshentrup/expressiveness-6ef8c034bc65
https://www.rangevoting.org/Expressiveness
> the most significant difference within democratic systems in quality of government by popular engagement, popular satisfaction with government, and a number of other measures is with the degree of proportionality of the main legislative body
there's absolutely no evidence for this. you're making the "proportional representation fallacy". i address this here.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representat...
so virtually everything you just said was incorrect. which is why it's good to study this issue and talk to experts before forming opinions.
