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CPG Grey has a lot of good videos, but ranked voting is not the way.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem makes this very clear.
https://star.vote/ is a good site to keep handy if you're looking for a more expressive voting system.
By default, choosing approval voting is the simplest way with very good performance.
I'm biased, but I think preferential voting is the best system. It's the system Australia uses, and it's great.
The big flaw of most democracies is that you risk wasting your vote. You can vote for a small party that has your values, but the chances of them beating the big parties are slim to none. So you vote for the big parties and they don't represent you despite you voting for them.
Preferential Voting takes your small party vote, and puts it to the next person you voted for. Your ballot sheet ends up completely filled.
I think the same should apply here.
Yeah, for a ballot with multiple candidates, I would prefer this approach. Ranked Choice Voting is the name that I’ve most often heard it referred to by advocates who want to adopt it in the US.
Seems like the only difference between this and what the OP is describing is whether every candidate has to be ranked, or just as many as you want to.
I agree that some kind of ranked voting makes a lot of sense, and it's something we should be looking at going forward. The mod vote is the perfect example (and some folks are doing it there), but we'd probably need the mods in place to handle the extra work.
We have a lot of work to do to get The Agora running well. This is a big one, but even simple things like the structure of how discussions and voting are handled need to be addressed.
Might be possible if we do voting on another platform? Something we can just click the boxes in order of preference? I had seen some discussion a couple days ago about using Decidum: https://sh.itjust.works/post/277452
As much as I would welcome a better voting system, taking it off platform brings all kinds of obstacles (technical, accessibility,...) and drawbacks (archived?, searchable?, discussion easy to find?)
And, by voting here, we may discuss our votes without any effort.
But, I think that with growth, the method of people commenting "aye" or "nay" is going to quickly run into issues. For one, how can we ever be sure a count is correct? Not saying out of nefariousness or anything, but even if you go "cmd/ctrl+f + aye/nay/other option" you still have the possibility of typos, the page not having loaded all the comments, and if we do restrict voting in the future or for specific decisions, that method would still need a manual review of potentially hundreds of comments and usernames.
Furthermore, others have suggested more open and democratic forms of voting such as ranking preferences, counting that by manually reviewing each comment is also not very feasible, but I do believe that system like these are necessary for the sort of democratic state the instance is trying to be.
Preferential/Ranked Choice voting is great. It removes the bias away from the most extreme options and allows people more agency by not forcing strategic voting: i.e. "I like the 2nd choice best but I have to vote for the 1st choice because it is more popular and otherwise the 3rd or 4th choice will win)"
I did something along these lines Here. Idk if a second vote is even considered, but I thought it would be best err on the side of too much information instead of too little. I fully support this for a vote that has more than two options. Slightly more confusing, but we're all smart here (enough to sign up on lemmy at least), so I think we could figure it out.
Fine idea.
Given it can get extracted by script, we could simply instruct each vote should contain a list of rankings in a specific format, like ... brainstorming:
4,5,2,1,34, 5, 2, 1,3"... to make it a bit syntax-tolerant.Edit ...
The more i think about it, the more i come to the pont that this method would be elegantly simplistic. [shoulderpat] ;-)
Cons:
Alerts:
(4, 5), 2My suggestion here is counting all rankings, not having a winner determined by the sums of first choices, which would introduce some complexity and possible elimination of ballots
Some ranked ballot systems that count all rankings: