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December 15th, 2020 Join us Thursday for our Initiative Strategy Session
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December 15th, 2020 Remote canvassing is now live! Help collect signatures for STAR Voting for Lane County.... without leaving your couch
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November 10th, 2020 Today, STAR Eugene finally had our day in court
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October 16th, 2020 Building a movement to scale: October events and updates from the front lines.
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July 28th, 2020 Eugene will keep fighting - See you in court
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July 25th, 2020 Judgement Day - We need you to speak in support of STAR Voting at the last Eugene public forum
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July 11th, 2020 Wait for it... STAR Eugene gears up for the campaign of a lifetime
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July 8th, 2020 Troutdale Launch!
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June 20th, 2020 Sunday meeting at 4:30pm, Eugene Council kicks the can, and 3 historic wins for STAR Voting!
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Eugene Worksession tomorrow! The moment of truth has arrived! Eugene City Council is our last chance to refer STAR Voting for Eugene to the November ballot!
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May 29th, 2020 The biggest story not covered in the 2020 Portland Primary was that our election WASN'T democratic. Despite the power of public matching funds to propel political outsiders into contention, the biggest story in this year's Portland city elections according to political newcomer, Jas Davis, is the failure of our current voting system to deliver democratic results. |
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April 25th, 2020 IPO Primary Countdown The Independent Party of Oregon primary, using STAR Voting for all statewide elections, goes live at 8am on Tuesday April 28th. |
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April 7th, 2020 IPO Primary Announcment Independent Party of Oregon Will Use STAR Voting In 2020 Primary Election, Open to all Independent and Non-Affiliated Voters |
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March 30th, 2020 2020 Vision: Could STAR Voting slay the “electability” dragon? We’re all too familiar with the landscape: Toxic campaign ads, candidates who do nothing but ask for your money and tell you what you want to hear, and at the end of the day one narrative to rule them all- don’t waste your vote on a candidate who isn’t “electable.” |
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March 15th, 2020 Remote Meetings/Volunteering Virtual meetings and action items you can do from home: STAR Voting volunteer opportunities |
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March 14th, 2020 Our voting system is 200 years old and dividing the nation. What if there was a better way? For more than two centuries, the U.S. has pioneered incredible technologies and advancements, and the country has evolved from an agrarian society to the always-online, connected country we are today. And yet with all this innovation, one thing has never changed: how we vote. |
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Public Forum and then Worksession! Eugene City Council is working to refer STAR Voting to the November ballot, but we need you to show up and tell them it's a priority! |
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February 25th, 2020 March Events and Action Items A pop-up garage sale, a Tea Talk, submitting public testimony, a new chapter launch, and monthly meetings. Carpe dium! |
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February 12th, 2020 Your candidate was "non-viable"? Your vote was wasted. In the shock and awe surrounding the upset of the 2020 primary kickoff -in which two of the highest polling candidates are currently tanking- the point that nobody is making is how these large field primaries disenfranchise huge swaths of voters. |
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February 11th, 2020 STAR Voting poll for the 2020 presidential primary What would happen if voting based on "electability" was a thing of the past? What if we had a voting method that didn't break when we have multiple options to choose from? Vote in the 2020 primary poll and try STAR for yourself! |
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January 25, 2020 Leveling up! STAR Voting World Headquarters Coming soon! Work Parties, a Garage Sale, and then we open shop! |
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January 5th, 2020 Let the campaigning begin! Eugene and Lane County, all eyes are on you! |
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Holiday Fundraiser 2019 was a breakout year for STAR Voting and the holidays are a great time to reflect and be grateful for all we have accomplished |
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Eugene rejects signatures: Nobody said it would be easy October 30th, 2019. After turning in 10,406 signatures for the STAR Voting for Eugene petition, the county elections office has ruled the petition "void," falling just 111 short of the required 8,091 verified signatures. Don't lose heart! ... |
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November 5th, 2019 DNC to use STAR Voting to elect Oregon's Presidential Delegates to the Democratic National Convention! |
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October 7th, 2019 One Week to go for STAR Eugene: Today marks one week until the deadline. We've turned in our first 8,174 signatures so far. 8,081 valid signatures are required, but we may not know our validity rate until it's too late. Every single signature could be the difference between success and failure. |
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September 11th, 2020 One month to go before STAR's Eugene signature deadline! We need 10,500 verified signatures by October 14th! That's 8,091 verified, plus a 30% buffer. |
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July 30th, 2019 Live Music, Street Fairs, and Volunteer Opportunities for all! STAR Voting for Lane County is finally approved to collect signatures! ... and all it took was 2 months of extreme paperwork, one legal judgement in our favor, and world class patience and optimism. |
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Approved to collect signatures July 4th - October 14th. STAR Voting for Eugene! This summer is the crux of the movement. July 4th - October 14th. We have 100 days to collect 8,091 verified signatures! |
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June 3rd, 2019 This is the beginning: Paperwork filed for STAR Voting ballot initiatives! Today is the beginning. |
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May 23rd, 2019 Summer Plan The Flashpoint: Over the next 2 months, we have an incredible opportunity to launch our 2019 STAR Voting campaign, highlighting 2 ballot initiatives in central Oregon while laying the foundation for others statewide and beyond. |
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April 4th, 2020 The UnrigTheSystem Summit rocked! Last weekend STAR Voting advocates from around the country flew into Nashville, Tennessee to attend the nations largest election reform summit of the year. UnrigTheSystem, hosted by our partner Represent.Us, included 3 days of speakers, panels, workshops, and more. |
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March 7th, 2020 Ballot Initiatives: How the people can change policy! Getting initiatives on the ballot, building coalitions, and getting people educated on issues doesn't happen overnight. To organize, delegate, and get it done we have regular monthly meetings in both Eugene and Portland, with subcommittee meetings and more in between. |
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February 2nd, 2019STAR Voting is rolling, you're invited! Blast off! Despite the fact that some of us took some well deserved time off over the holidays, others just didn't get the memo. It's only been a few short months since the last election, but STAR Voting advocates from across the political spectrum have been hard at work laying the foundation to adopt STAR Voting in their own organizations. They've made a lot of progress! Meanwhile others have been drafting charter amendments, reaching out to our elected officials, and even going to Salem. Wow! |
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November 28th, 2018 Team Strategy Meeting for STAR Voting, Tomorrow! 7-9! |
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November 19th, 2018 Thank You Lane County!!! We didn't get everything we'd hoped for, but we did get almost 47% of the vote! That's incredible considering this is a new reform, organized by a grassroots team, with little institutional backing. We put STAR Voting on the map and proved that this proposal is viable! |
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Nov 8th, 2018 WORLD’S FIRST CAMPAIGN FOR STAR VOTING MOVES TO NEXT STAGE Lane County petitioners celebrate historic first campaign to institute STAR Voting |
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October 26th, 2018 This is the home stretch! 11 days left to get the word out! Tomorrow! Parade! This is the home stretch and the name of the game is inspiration! I'm inspired, you're inspired and we need the world to know it and get inspired too! Our volunteers have been dauntless and our team is stronger now than ever. We'll be out every single day from now until November 6th. Join us! |
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October 8th, 2020 Oakshire Benefit Concert with the Muddy Souls! Come out this Wednesday at 5 to celebrate with us! $1 from every beer all day will be donated to our education and outreach fund. Town Hall on STAR Voting!
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October 2nd, 2018Upcoming Events and Call to Action! We have lawn signs! Lawn signs are free and we encourage you to take one and display it proudly! |
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September 24th, 2018 Last 2 days of Best of Eugene!: Vote now at weekly.star.vote |
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September 18th, 2018Park your partisan politics at the door |
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September 18th, 2018Volunteer Catalyzation for STAR Voting! STAR Voting made the ballot in Lane County! Now it's time to hit the streets and spread the word! Education and outreach are the name of the game. Come out every Saturday to Theo's Coffee a for our STAR Voting volunteer breakout sessions. The events are co-hosted with Lane County Our Revolution and go from 11am to 1pm. |
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August 12th, 2018 Our take on FairVote's position regarding STAR Voting We were excited to learn that FairVote, the nation's leading advocate of Ranked Choice Voting, took a deep look at STAR Voting. We were doubly thrilled when their astute researchers weren't able to come up with even a single viable weakness of the STAR Voting method. Our only true disappointment is that FairVote, to date, has yet to correct the significant inaccuracies in their article, despite repeated asks from the Equal Vote Coalition and others. |
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August 12th, 2018 STAR Voting on Nov ballot! Lane County voters will have the opportunity this fall to institute an exciting new reform, replacing the "top-two jungle primary" system we currently use for elected county offices with STAR Voting! The response to our initiative petitioning was overwhelmingly positive, showing the hunger voters (and non-voters!) have for a better way to vote and elect people to public office. |
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August 9th, 2018 Response to FairVote Article on STAR Voting |
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August 2nd, 2018 STAR Voting: Heal Democracy! Necessity is the mother of invention and not surprisingly this has been a groundbreaking year for election reform. In Oregon the Equal Vote Coalition is collecting signatures for twin ballot initiatives in Multnomah and Lane Counties to fundamentally change the way we vote. |
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July 24th, 2018 STAR Voting: The Quest for Democracy! Necessity is the mother of invention and not surprisingly this has been a groundbreaking year for election reform. In Oregon the Equal Vote Coalition is collecting signatures for twin ballot initiatives in Multnomah and Lane Counties to fundamentally change the way we vote. |
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May 11th, 2017 STAR Voting gets its first field trial, two campaigns... and a new name! If my Google News Alerts are a valid indicator, public interest in election process reform has seen a huge increase since the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. We're witnessing this directly here in Oregon as we work to bring STAR Voting* (SRV) to public elections for the first time. |
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May 9th, 2017 |
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May 2nd, 2017 STAR Voting Election Calculator With Google Forms it's fairly easy to set up and run your own STAR Voting* elections, by copying and pasting in a simple script. This post is a step-by-step guide that shows how to do that. |
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March 13th, 2017 The Relaxed Majority Criterion A voting system satisfies the Relaxed Majority Criterion if a majority faction of voters can express a non-zero "maximum support - 1" to a second choice candidate, and still guarantee that the majority faction's "maximum supported" first choice wins. |
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Is this about the Electoral College? The mission of Equal.Vote is embedded in our name. Even though our initial focus is on the mechanics of the vote itself, when folks keep asking us, "Is this about the Electoral College?", we have to say yes to that too. |
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March 12, 2017 What the heck happened in Burlington? Its advocates claim that "With Ranked Choice Voting, you can honestly rank candidates without having to worry about how others will vote and who is more or less likely to win" because if your first choice can't win, your second choice will be counted. In truth, Ranked Choice only counts the secondary preferences of some of the voters who put a non-winning candidate in first position, and this can and does lead to non-representative, non-majoritarian outcomes. |
STAR Voting is simple. 5-Best, 0-Worst.
As a rule of thumb, it's a good idea to give your favorite or favorites a full five stars, give your worst candidate or candidates zero stars, and arrange the others in between. With STAR it's easy to show your preference order and also your level of support for each candidate.
It's safe to vote your conscience, and you don't have to worry about voting for the 'lesser of two evils' or wasting your vote. If your favorite can't win, your vote automatically goes to the finalist you prefer.
FAQ: I didn't give either finalist 5 stars. Does that mean that my vote is less powerful than someone who did?
No. In STAR Voting the automatic runoff is binary, so it's one-person-one-vote. Your ballot already shows which finalist you scored higher, and your vote goes to the finalist your prefer.
FAQ: What if I gave both finalists the same score?
If you gave both finalists the same score, that is counted as a vote of no preference between those two in the final round.
Rest assured. Those scores were counted. If you gave them both five stars, congratulations! You love them both, and one of your candidates is guaranteed to win this election. If you gave them both zeros that means you hate both equally and you did everything in your power to prevent both from being elected. If you gave them both threes you think they are both equally mediocre. If you do have a preference it's important to show it on your ballot.
FAQ: What if I don't know enough about the candidates to score them all?
With STAR Voting you don't have to score all the candidates. It's fine to just vote for your favorite and be done with it. You are welcome to leave as many candidates as you like blank. Those candidates will receive zeros from you and no matter what, they will never get your vote.
Still, the incentive is to at least do enough research on the candidates to show your preference order.
Click here for more FAQs.
In a historic milestone for election reform, Oregon’s largest bloc of voters will use STAR Voting for the Independent Party of Oregon’s May Primary Election, the first time in history the innovative new voting method will be used in a major election.
Eugene, Oregon, April 7, 2020—The Independent Party of Oregon will use STAR Voting in its 2020 May Primary Election, the first time in history that voters will have the opportunity to use the innovative new voting method in a statewide political election, the Equal Vote Coalition announced today. Voting will open on April 28th and close on May 12th, and will feature nominations for statewide offices as well as a Presidential Preference Poll.
“This is truly a milestone in election reform, continuing a long tradition of trailblazing electoral efforts in the state of Oregon,” said Mark Frohnmayer, founder of the Equal Vote Coalition. “The STAR Voting method, invented here in Oregon, offers best-in-class representational accuracy, simplicity, familiarity and expressiveness for voters, as well as transparency of election results. STAR Voting eliminates the spoiler effect and allows voters to honestly express their true preferences without fear of wasting their votes.”
More than one million voters are eligible to vote in the Independent Party primary, including registered members of the Independent Party of Oregon and those not affiliated with any political party. In total, this represents the largest voting bloc in the state, greater than the number of registered voters in either of the state’s major political parties.
"We are thrilled to be the first organization to conduct a binding election using STAR Voting," said Independent Party Co-Chair Rob Harris. "Our hope is to use our election to show voters that how we vote in America is not set in stone. It is a matter of choice. The current system has led to a divided and dysfunctional government. We would like to show people that other, better, options are available."
In STAR, which stands for “Score Then Automatic Runoff,” voters score each candidate on a familiar 0-5 scale. The winner is the majority favorite between the two highest scoring candidates overall. STAR Voting represents a nationally viable alternative to the traditional “Choose-Only-One” voting method, which election experts have identified as the key factor leading to two party polarization in American politics. Choose-Only-One voting is highly susceptible to the vote-splitting “spoiler effect,” which leads to strategic “lesser evil” voting and magnifies the influence of money in the political process.
STAR Voting continues a long tradition of Oregon firsts in election reform. In 1998, Oregon pioneered Vote-by-Mail, which was followed by “Motor Voter” automatic voter registration in 2016. Oregon now consistently ranks as a national leader in voter turnout. In 1902 Oregon was the first state in the country to implement a ballot initiative and referendum process, known then as “The Oregon System,” which was widely adopted across the country.
Media Contact:
Jonathan Miller
pr@equal.vote
About the Equal Vote Coalition -
The Equal Vote Coalition is a nonpartisan organization and registered 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to promoting true equality in the vote itself. It’s work centers around electoral research and voting reform, as well as community education and coalition building to promote better elections, and a more equitable and representative political discourse.
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STAR stands for Score Then Automatic Runoff, and that's exactly how it works:
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One of the most important criteria we use to evaluate voting methods is "Accuracy", but how do we determine if a voting method is accurate? Does it elect the candidates who should win? Is it fair and representative?
There are a number of tools that voting scientists use to answer these questions and like all good science lovers we advocate taking a close look from multiple perspectives. For evaluating the accuracy of individual elections one approach is to find the "Condorcet Winner," the candidate who would beat all others in a head to head race. For comparing accuracy of multiple elections most voting scientists turn to election simulations to measure accuracy. "Bayesian Regret" is one such model and the Yee simulations are another. Modeling from John Huang is a newer addition to the body of evidence which all are in agreement as to relative conclusions comparing voting methods. One of the most sophisticated and realistic is "Voter Satisfaction Efficiency," from Harvard PhD in Statistics Dr. Jameson Quinn. Quinn was Vice-Chair at the Center for Election Science at the time this study came out, and he has since joined the Equal Vote Coalition board of Directors. These simulations can be an invaluable addition to the data we can collect from real world elections.
Real world, empirical election data is also a critical source of information. Unfortunately, the basic choose-one-only style ballot doesn't give us much data to go on. These ballots are not expressive enough to collect the voters' full opinions, and we have no way of knowing if the votes cast were honest or dishonest. We also have no way of knowing if factors like vote splitting and the Spoiler Effect distorted the election outcome. Simply determining the candidate who got the most votes only goes so far.
For assessing voting methods with less expressive ballots, pre-voting-day polling and exit polls can be a valuable addition to election results and ballot data. In many cases ratings are used in this kind of polling because a rating is able to collect the kind of data needed to assess less expressive ballot data and election results. Nonetheless we can draw firm conclusions from the data, polling, and other kinds of observation and trends.
For example, failed elections due to vote splitting and the Spoiler Effect can be glaringly obvious. The 2000 presidential election with George Bush Sr. (Republican) vs Al Gore (Democrat) and Ralph Nader (Green Party) is a classic example, even if we ignore the electoral collage. In that election, a majority of voters were from the Left end of the political spectrum. Based on polling we can safely conclude that many Green Party voters would have preferred Gore, and if we had a more expressive voting system, the election would have elected Gore. In 1996 the same scenario happened in reverse where the Republican Bob Dole was likely the candidate preferred overall, but he lost the election to Bill Clinton after voters on the Right were split between Bob Dole and Ross Perot.
Among voting scientists there is full consensus that our choose-one-only voting method is wildly inaccurate with more than two candidates in the race.
“The fact is that FPTP, the voting method we use in most of the English-speaking world, is absolutely horrible, and there is reason to believe that reforming it would substantially (though not of course completely) alleviate much political dysfunction and suffering.” -Jameson Quinn in “A Voting Theory Primer for Rationalists”
Real world data is particularly insightful when we are looking at election results from voting systems that do use more expressive ballots. For example Instant Runoff Voting uses an expressive ballot, but also uses a multi-round, tournament style elimination process which doesn't count all the rankings. When we go back and look at the ballot data again, sometimes we find elections where the candidate who won wasn't actually preferred by the voters... according to the ballots cast.
One of the most cutting edge tools for measuring election accuracy is VSE or Voter Satisfaction Efficiency. VSE analyzes voting methods using thousands of simulated elections across a wide variety of scenarios. Factors and variables like strategic voters, voters blocks who cluster on issues, number of candidates, degree of polarization, and more are considered to help us determine when and how often an election system elects the best candidate. In VSE the candidate who should win is defined as the "candidate that would make as many voters as possible, as satisfied as possible with the election outcome."
Voter Satisfaction Efficiency makes a strong case for STAR Voting. In VSE, STAR topped the charts, coming in as more accurate than all other voting systems that are being seriously advocated for, many of them by large margins. The only voting system that was close to on par was a Condorcet Method called Ranked Pairs which had previously set the bar for accuracy but which is too complex to be viable in real world elections.
Here are some of the findings that we can extrapolate from the VSE graphs:
You can learn more about Voter Satisfaction Efficiency here.
In 2006, Ka-Ping Yee introduced a way to examine single-winner election methods via computer graphics (see: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/). Each colored circle represents a candidate in a 3 or 4 candidate election in a two-dimensional political space. Each white dot represents an individual voter. This kind of visualization is useful in that you can see exactly how ideologically close or far each voter is from each candidate. The color of the background represents which candidate would win under each method if a randomized electorate, centered at that point, were to vote. This model is a simplification of our complex political spectrum, but it does a good job at illustrating common phenomena that effect election outcomes.
Yee's diagrams show some serious pathologies with the Plurality and Instant Runoff methods, but it is unclear from his descriptions whether these were frequent occurrences, or if they were chosen specifically to highlight these flaws. This video follows on Yee's work by animating the positions of the candidates in the two-dimensional political space, and adds Score Voting, STAR Voting (aka Score Runoff Voting) and a one-voter "ideal winner" model. Where plurality and IRV tend to squeeze out candidates in the center, Score tends to give an advantage to candidates who are positioned in between other candidates. STAR Voting consistently performs closest to the ideal model of the systems visualized. We also recommend checking out the work of Nicky Case, which has a great article where you can directly interact with voting systems and scenarios to see what would happen.
The Condorcet winner is the candidate that was preferred over all others head-to-head. A ranked ballot or any other ballot that shows voter's preferences is all that is needed to find the Condorcet winner if one exists. When there is a Condorcet winner there's a good case to be made that that candidate should have won. Unfortunately Condorcet can be limited because there isn't always a single winner that was preferred over all others. Sometimes preferences are cyclical. (A>B, B>C, C>A.)
Another problem is that there are a few situations where some people may argue that the Condorcet winner didn't actually have the most support. Advocates of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV; commonly called Ranked Choice Voting) often argue this to defend the results of a recent Burlington Vermont IRV election which didn't elect the candidate who was preferred over all others. In order to make that argument convincingly we would need to know more than just voters' preference orders, we would need to know how much each voter liked each candidate.
In ranked ballot systems there's no way to know if a voter actually liked their second choice. Second choice could mean full support if a voter really loves more than one candidate. Conversely a voter's second choice may be a candidate whom they strongly dislike, but who is better than their worst case scenario.
In a 2009 Burlington Mayor's race there were three viable candidates, a Democrat, Republican, and a Progressive, and all three had significant support. The Democrat was preferred over all others (the Condorcet Winner) but came in third place after voters first choice votes were counted. The Progressive won.
Many Republican voters had ranked the Democrat as their second choice to show that they preferred the Democrat to the Progressive candidate. If these voters would have actually been significantly more satisfied if the Democrat had won, then the Condorcet winner did deserve to win after all. On the other hand if Republicans would have been almost equally dissatisfied with either the Democrat or the Progressive, then the Progressive was probably the candidate with the most support after all. To learn more about Burlington read more from Equal Vote here, more from The Center for Election Science here, and more from the Center for Range Voting here.
The point is that in these kinds of close three way ties it's critical to have enough ballot data to determine if the candidate who won had the most support or not. For that we need a ballot that allows us to show degree of support, as well as vote no preference if desired. In Burlington the ballots clearly showed that the Democrat was preferred over all others. The Democrat was the Condorcet winner and so he clearly deserved to win according to the ballots cast. Instant Runoff Voting was repealed the following election.
These kinds of inaccurate results could unfairly affect any kind of candidate. In a different election IRV could just as easily elect a Democrat where a Progressive was preferred by voters, or a Republican where a Democrat was preferred, or any other combination.
STAR Voting would usually elect the Condorcet winner, but if it doesn't, the preference degree data should provide a convincing case for why another candidate actually had more support and better represented the people.
