It would be great to be able to vote for every candidate in an election instead of only once and you can decide to upvote, downvote, or not vote for any candidate. This way you never “throw away” your vote and extreme/hated candidates can be downvoted so if im not a fan of any candidate but one is particularly awful I can downvote that one and not vote any I don’t like while still making my voice heard that I definitely don’t want this specific candidate

Edit: Combined Approval Voting is what I want and its used by to elect the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee and the Secretary General of the United Nations

Edit 2: You can learn about and try different voting methods in this amazing project https://ncase.me/ballot/

    • sp6@lemmy.world
      0·
      11 months ago

      I was all-in for ranked choice voting (and even started working on an app for it) until I learned that a candidate who would have won can end up losing by becoming more popular, which is extremely counterintuitive, and a flaw that I don’t think any voting system should have.

      Nicky Case wrote a fantastic explanation about how that can happen, plus exploring many other voting methods: https://ncase.me/ballot/

      I still think RCV (and really anything else) would be better than the US’s first-past-the-post system, but I’d definitely prefer some type of approval, score, or STAR voting over it.

      • Zippy@lemmy.world
        01·
        11 months ago

        Yes. Often there are unintended results. I think another issue is that many people would have difficulty understanding the math behind it. It is not complex but it doesn’t end up with concise results sometimes and distrust in the system can certainly jilt some people as we have witnessed enough.

    • Nix@merv.newsOPEnglish
      01·
      11 months ago

      I have. What i want is an improved verison of Approval Voting

  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
    2·
    11 months ago

    Personally I prefer the idea of ranking each candidate in order of preference, ie “this is my favorite candidate, this is my second-favorite, and so on for all the candidates with enough support to be on the ballot”. I feel like it has more granularity than an upvote downvote system would have.

    • Nix@merv.newsOPEnglish
      01·
      11 months ago

      Cant you summarize it in your comment and apply it to the post in a way you think it belongs?

      • DessertStorms@kbin.social
        1·
        11 months ago

        It’s a form of governance, you either want to read even just the last paragraph for yourself, or you don’t… ¯\(ツ)/¯

  • tygerprints@kbin.social
    11·
    11 months ago

    That sort of ranked choice voting would be great in areas where there is truly a democratic option. In Utah, there is no other party except Republicans. They have gerrymandered every district so that only republicans can have their votes counted, and it is not possible to register as anything other than republican in Utah. That’s one reason we’re so in the pockets of big oil and gas industries here - it’s all about how much money politicians can line their pocket with. But the point is - there is no way to downvote anyone. Most of us don’t even get a chance to vote here.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
      2·
      11 months ago

      A slight misconception in your comment, what OP is describing is much closer to a slightly limited version of Score. Or possibly an expanded Approval.

      It’s nothing like Ranked Choice.

      To break things down, Ranked Choice is an Ordinal voting system. You rank candidates A then B then C.

      The actual mechanics of the election are a series of First Past the Post elections all on a single ballot.

      To contrast, Approval and Score are both Cardinal voting systems. You express preference for A, but that doesn’t mean anything about your preference for B. The votes per candidate are counted independently of the votes for any other candidate. This means that Cardinal voting systems are 100% immune to the spoiler effect. They’re also almost completely immune to clone candidates and other such attacks.

      Ordinal systems will always fall victim to the spoiler effect, although the more complex ordinal voting systems like Ranked Choice mitigate it somewhat (while making things so much worse when it does crop up)