Talk:STAR voting

Improving precinct-summability example

@BetterVotingAdvocacy: an example of summing from precincts is a great idea, I had someone ask me for one the other day, actually, but I don't think this example is very easy to follow. I'd like to see something like the "star voting: precinct sum" image from https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv#simplicity, and with a small set of short, more abstract candidates like https://star.vote/wa17e1cn/ or https://star.vote/x1h3w5fk/

Ideally it would show a few ballots from one precinct and how those combine into the two tables, then show a few tables from (maybe 2) other precincts and how they combine in the central location, and then how they are tallied. Something that people can easily wrap their heads around. — Psephomancy (talk) 05:14, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

I've made an edit along the lines of what you asked, let me know what further improvements you want. I've avoided making it too long, so most of what you mentioned is just written out as text rather than showing all of the different matrices, with the exception of showing how to get the final result. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 07:06, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Why 5 stars?

In most examples, STAR voting asks people to rate candidates on a 0-5 scale. Is the choice of 5 stars completely arbitrary (based on familiarity with 5-star scales), or is it chosen for some other reason? If the latter, would it make sense to use half-star increments for voting (also familiar to most people), to give more flexibility?

My thought: sometimes I prefer one candidate over another, so I'd like to give them different ratings to express different opinions in the runoff, but I run up against the issue that if I subtract a whole point, this might result in a fairly substantial (17%) reduction in their score.

This might be intentional, though: with something like a 100-point scale, there would be very little difference between being a strategic voter's 1st choice and their 10th choice in the first round, so the coarser scale makes strategic exaggeration harder.

Intuitively, the half-star feels like a reasonable compromise, but other people might disagree on how to balance these criteria. (Some people even prefer approval voting, which limits strategic exaggeration even more!) Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 01:04, 2 February 2024 (UTC)