Talk:STAR voting

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The following Wikipedia contributor has declared a personal or professional connection to the subject of this article. Relevant policies and guidelines may include conflict of interest, autobiography, and neutral point of view.

Sarawolk (talk · contribs) This user has declared a connection. ((Optional) Executive Director at the Equal Vote Coalition 501c3, a nonprofit which recommends STAR Voting among other voting methods, and at STAR Voting Action 501c4, which advocates for STAR Voting.)

The following Wikipedia contributor has declared a personal or professional connection to the subject of this article. Relevant policies and guidelines may include conflict of interest, autobiography, and neutral point of view.

jman722 (talk · contribs) This user has declared a connection. ((Optional) Deputy Director at the Equal Vote Coalition 501c3, a nonprofit which recommends STAR Voting among other voting methods, and at STAR Voting Action 501c4, which advocates for STAR Voting.)

This article was nominated for deletion. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination:

Keep, 21 August 2018, see discussion.
merge to range voting, 5 April 2017, see discussion.
delete, 9 December 2016, see discussion.

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Independence of Clones

STAR voting violates independence of clones.

Example:

Suppose there are two candidates: A, B. Suppose candidate A has the best score; candidate B has the worst score. Candidate B pairwise beats candidate A.

When STAR voting is used, then candidate A and candidate B get into the runoff and candidate B wins.

Suppose candidate A is replace by clones A1 and A2 such that candidate A1 has the best score, candidate A2 has the second best score, and candidate B has the worst score, candidate A1 pairwise beats candidate A2, candidate B pairwise beats candidate A1, and candidate B pairwise beats candidate A2.

When STAR voting is applied to these ballots, then candidate A1 and candidate A2 get into the runoff and candidate A1 wins. This is a violation of independence of clones (and Condorcet). Markus Schulze 13:10, 22 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

How could Candidate B possibly beat Candidate A pairwise if A has a higher score than B? In a two-candidate race, the person with the higher score in STAR voting should always be the person who gets more votes in traditional FPTP voting. Right? Sonicsuns (talk) 00:42, 2 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Strategic incentives

We just had an edit changing this line:

The runoff step was introduced in order to reduce strategic incentives in ordinary score voting

to this:

The runoff step was introduced in an attempt to reduce strategic incentives in ordinary score voting

Is someone trying to imply that the attempt was unsuccessful? From what I can tell, STAR voting really does reduce strategic incentives compared to ordinary score voting. Sonicsuns (talk) 00:47, 2 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

from what you can tell, sure. but that would be speculation which is not appropriate for encyclopedic writing. STAR will have to be used in some real-world elections and research will have to be performed on these elections (by experts) before a determination can be made as to whether or not the attempt is successful.

the only thing that is objectively true and can be sourced back to high-quality citations is that the *intention* of the designers is to reduce strategic incentives. Affinepplan (talk) 16:31, 2 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]