What voting reform method is best?

So you think our current government is broken.

Studies show the US is not a democracy*. Average citizens' support for a bill has near-zero impact on its chance of passing. Billion-dollar lobbyists write laws and coerce representatives to pass them. People joke that politicians never get anything done, lie all the time, and so on, and those jokes are often reality. And it is not getting any better.

The problem is, these happen in both parties. It is not enough to vote out the current representatives. The underlying system is at fault. You may have heard of possible fixes like overturning the Citizens United v. FEC court decision, or ending gerrymandering. However, even without all of that, we still have a problem. With only two main parties, anyone who disagrees with both is forced to choose the lesser evil or else waste their vote. Corrupt politicians present voters with a dilemma: vote for the other party (that you believe is wrong) or vote for your party (who is corrupt and evil) or stay home (which helps the other party anyway).

The only way to truly fix politics is to dive deep. Deeper than redistricting, ballot access, money, and primaries. We need to change the nature of the ballot to something entirely different: something more expressive than just checking off one name, so you can express complex opinions on several candidates. But what should it be? The answer lies in another form of voting most of us have tried in some form or another...

*Yes, technically the US is a republic. The word "democracy", however, stems from "demos" (the people) and "kratia" (have the power / rule), and even in a republic the people are supposed to have power to select their representatives. Right now, however, money tends to play a bigger part in selecting those "representatives" than the will of average citizens anyway. Meanwhile, those so-called "representatives" are not truly representing the interests of average citizens. So, you can argue the US is not a republic either.

You know how you can rate restaurants on websites like Yelp? Have you ever noticed that Yelp does not force you to vote for one favorite restaurant, and then say absolutely nothing about all the other places out there? Instead, you can rate each one individually from 1 to 5. You can express more complex opinions, like "I like A a little better than B, but C was terrible". The average rating is displayed for all to see: would you go to a place averaging 1.2 out of 5? Similar rating scales are used on Amazon, the Apple App Store, and Consumer Reports. Olympic gymnasts are judged on a point scale. In none of these cases are the voters forced to give only one rating, or a fixed sum of points. (A fixed sum would just lead to more vote-splitting.)

What if we applied that principle to the ballot box? In fact, let's extend the scale to 0 to 10 (starting with 0 so you are not forced to give any "support" to a candidate you absolutely detest). You might vote something like this:

• Alice = 10
• Bob = 8
• Carol = 5
• Dave = 1
• Evil = 0

This system, known as "Score Voting", may seem too simple to be any good, but it has some really nice properties. Score Voting treats every candidate independently, which means it truly eliminates spoiler problems. (You could give your true favorite a 10, and the frontrunner anything from 5 to 10 depending on how much you like them.) It also allows third parties to grow without affecting the major parties at all (until they win, of course). That is, voters can give scores to Greens and Libertarians, and if such candidates lose, it has no effect on the race.

As an example, a conservative voter in 2016 (if the election were done with Score Voting) may have voted something like this:

10 - Trump
8 - Rubio
5 - Johnson
1 - Stein
0 - Bernie
0 - Hillary

Similarly, a liberal may have voted

10 - Hillary
10 - Bernie
9 - Stein
5 - Johnson
2 - Rubio
0 - Trump

(You might be thinking that score voting violates "one person one vote" because the liberal gave out 36 points, and the conservative only gave 24, hence the liberal had more power. However, looking more closely, we see that the two votes perfectly cancel out, so clearly neither one had "more power" than the other.)

If my other article made you skeptical of claims to preventing spoilers, do not worry. Score Voting's spoiler avoidance can be proven: if Bob runs, then either Bob will win, or else someone else scores higher, in which case Bob's score or decision to run does not matter at all.
Also, with some clever engineering, Score Voting can be counted on existing voting machines.

The best thing about Score is that third parties have a path to victory. Initially, only the two major parties will win, but voters will know that they can safely give third parties non-zero scores. Over time, those scores will increase as awareness rises. Eventually, the (best) third parties will be able to compete with major parties, and the media will have to give them coverage. While third parties may not completely replace the major ones, they will at least be competitive, allowing for more diverse opinions represented in the government.

But perhaps you genuinely like one of the major parties. Well, you are still in luck. Multiple candidates of the same party (or a similar ideology) can run in a Score election as allies. This means that if some of them are corrupt evil liars, you (and everyone else) can give them zeroes without preventing your favorite party from winning. As long as honest people run, this will make politicians much more accountable. This will also make it easier for them to work together, as if they do not, they could be replaced by someone better.

The same reason shows that Score Voting reduces the influence of money in politics, but in a more natural way than passing laws.

But there are others who say...

Some criticize Score Voting as being susceptible to strategic voting. Although you can always score your favorite maximum safely, there may be more nuanced strategies that voters may exploit. In particular, the "Equal Vote Coalition" (www.equal.vote) argues that Score Voting yields unrepresentative outcomes if there is "one-sided strategy", i.e. voters from one party tend to vote honestly while the opposite party tends to vote tactically. They propose a slight modification to Score to balance things out. It is called Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR).

With STAR, the two candidates with the most points are declared "finalists". The finalist scored higher on more ballots wins. (So if you score Alice 3 and Bob 2, and those are the top two, then your vote counts as a full Alice vote in the artificial runoff.) Also, most STAR implementations use 0-5 (because of 5-star ratings), not 0-10 as I described for Score.

STAR voting is a little harder to count than Score, though it can be done with a "precinct subtotal". (Each precinct publishes the total score and the winning margin of every possible runoff. The scores are added up and the appropriate pair margin in each table is used to determine the runoff winner.)

STAR voting also shares the property that multiple candidates from the same party can run as allies, and that voting for your favorite is safe if that favorite is sure to make the runoff. There are, however, cases where you may push a weak favorite into the runoff instead of a strong compromise candidate, and someone worse wins. (These should be rare, though.) STAR also is slightly vulnerable to "cloning" (where two very similar candidates run), but instead of splitting votes, those two may take both runoff seats and ensure one of them wins.

Although plain Score is simpler, STAR should also break two-party domination. (STAR allows candidates to "grow in the shadows" just like Score, and if many alternative candidates run, the chances are high that two will make the runoff.)

Further Reading

If you would like to research further, here are some links:
Equal Vote Coalition: www.equal.vote (promotes STAR voting)
Center for Election Science: www.electionscience.org (promotes "Approval Voting" which is Score but only allowing 2 levels "Approve" and "Disapprove")
The website www.scorevoting.net is a detailed website explaining the benefits of Score Voting. Some of its content is a bit outdated, though, and it may seem like a "by PhDs for PhDs" site in some places. (Or maybe not.)