Talk:STAR voting

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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

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