Score Voting
Score Voting is a method of voting on large fields of candidates or things, without having to hold multiple rounds of voting to capture people’s preferences. In conventional voting systems, which might have Primaries or Runoff elections before or after a General Election, Score Voting is an improvement in that it eliminates the need for these extra rounds of voting.
How It Works
Suppose you wanted to express your favorite foods to a friend. You write down your list of foods, and put next to them a score, 0–10. Maybe:
Cheese 10
Strawberries 7
Blueberries 7
Broccoli 0
Benefits
Right away you can see one of the benefits of Score Voting: You can easily express a tie. But hidden away here is another benefit, which is that you can easily express where that tie sits relative to your other preferences. In conventional voting, where you vote for just one thing, you wouldn’t be able to express a tie — in fact, you wouldn’t be able to express anything, but one vote. This drives the need for hacky fixes like Runoffs and Primaries. In another style of voting, called Ranked Choice Voting, you could express that you like Cheese more than Strawberries more than Broccoli, but you’d be forced to betray your preferences when you rank Blueberries, higher or lower than Strawberries.
Deciding Who Wins
Another benefit of Score Voting is that to decide who wins, you just, sum up the votes!
Suppose you and some friends were trying to name your new sports club. You might brainstorm 400 names, then send them to friends saying hey, score these 0–10. You’re allowed to use decimals. You’ll get back 400 scores each, and if you sent it right, they’ll accrue in a spreadsheet or database. Just sum the scores for each name. Highest score is the winner. Highest ten scores? Your Top 10.
More Benefits
The benefits of eliminating hacky fixes like Runoffs and Primaries are bigger than they might seem. In simple club settings like a group of friends, getting everyone to vote once is already really hard — it can be like herding cats. Getting everyone to vote twice? Twice as hard. Try it, I bet you’ll lose some people on each round — and it’ll be different people.
Over Ranked-Choice
Another improved voting system is “Ranked Choice Voting,” where you rank your choices or candidates down the ballot. Score Voting has a slight advantage here when multiple similar choices are present along with multiple dissimilar. Suppose for example, that you had an election with 3 of our greatest presidents, and Voldemort, and Death Eaters had snuck into 40% of the voting populace (if you don’t know what this means, Voldemort is bad and Death Eaters like him). In Score Voting, you’d likely give 9s to the 3 greatest presidents, and a 0 to Voldemort. But in Ranked Choice Voting, you’d be forced to rank them like:
Pres 1
Pres 2
Pres 3
Voldemort
Which implies that your preference for 1 over 2 is as large as your preference for 3 over Voldemort, and, that your preference for 1 over 3 is twice that. This isn’t true, and the 3 best candidates being roughly equal, it’s likely that #1 slot will be spread out amongst goodly voters, while the Death Eaters all rank Voldemort as #1. That’s about 20% putting each of the great presidents in a #1 slot, while Voldemort has 40% of the #1 slots. The result in Ranked Choice in this scenario can be that Voldemort wins, because he got more #1 votes than anyone else. Score Voting prevents this “tyranny of the minority.”
In Politics
In politics, where malice comes into play, Runoffs and Primaries open the door to Voter Manipulation. For example, a political party can manipulate a Top Two Runoff election by helping fund a lot of candidates for the opposing party, while restricting their own field to 2. By spreading all the initial votes out across say, 10 candidates for the opposing party and 2 for theirs, they’ll likely win both slots in the Runoff. Now the Runoff election is rigged — either they win, or they win!
Likewise, Primary elections are usually owned and run by a particular political party. Allowing those who want power, to have the power to decide how that power is granted, is fundamentally corrupt. It allows the parties to manipulate who can get past their own arbitrary gates before entering the General Election, and rarely are those gates based on the will of the people. Often, they’re based on bribes.
