[EM] Some ways to extend social rankings to scores

[robert bristow-johnson]

Score is not the same as STAR, but they have something in common.  I'll, admit I don't think about Score Voting much outside of STAR.

Just to keep the problem tractable, I would leave it to single-winner and 3 significant candidates: the voter's favorite candidate, the 2nd-choice (or lesser evil) candidate, and the candidate that the voter hates.  The interaction (and number of permutations) with 4 or more candidates is just too many to get a good grip all of the contingencies.

There really is no reason for a voter to mark their STAR ballot any differently than 5-1-0 unless they anticipate the very same Center Squeeze effect that happened to Burlington 2009 or Alaska in August 2022.  In every other case, there is no incentive, whatsoever, to ever score your 2nd-choice or lessor evil candidate any higher than 1.

The only time a voter would ever want to score their lesser evil higher is if they actually *want* their lesser evil to defeat their favorite candidate in getting to the STAR automatic runoff.  This would be because the voter understands that their favorite candidate will not be able to defeat the candidate they hate in the final runoff.  In every other scenario, there is no incentive whatsoever to score one's lesser evil (or 2nd-choice) higher than 1, just enough to beat the candidate you hate in case your favorite cannot make it into the runoff.

I had a little argument with Mark Frohnmayer (the big STAR advocate/promoter, sorta like the Rob Richie of STAR) about this.

> On 02/10/2026 8:02 AM EST Kristofer Munsterhjelm via Election-Methods <election-methods at lists.electorama.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> Suppose we want to make a method return not just who won (and the order 
> of finish), but how well each candidate did - how close to each other 
> the candidates were - by also returning a score for each.
> 
> (See the end of the post for 2009 Burlington results :-)
> 

A couple of years ago, I did an analysis of STAR (where everyone votes 5-1-0) applied to Burlington 2009.  (I didn't worry about Smith or Simpson, while I *will* say Smith was not insignificant, he was eliminated before the big three that demonstrated the Center Squeeze.  Simpson and Write_in *are* insignificant, I wouldn't bother with any other keystrokes regarding Simpson or Write-In.)  Turns out it makes the same mistake as IRV (when people score 5-1-0).

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bbq6hu/heres_a_good_hypothetical_for_how_star_fails/ 

Sorry Kristofer, I'm just reacting.  I haven't read through your post, yet.  It looks complicated, but I'll get through it.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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