User:BetterVotingAdvocacy/Big page of ideas: Difference between revisions

Negative counting approaches can be applied to various voting methods. For example, it's possible to reserve a special mark in Score voting that indicates that a voter gave every non-write-in candidate the max score, and then also count negative scores for the voter in such a way as to reproduce their actual scores. The practicality of this would likely be limited to ballots that max-score nearly all of the candidates, though. This type of special mark actually changes the worst-case number of marks needed to count Approval; if every voter approves every candidate (which is unlikely, since the voter is indicating no preference between any of the non-write-in candidates), then only 1 mark needs to be made per ballot, rather than [number of candidates] marks. In fact, such a mark reduces the worst-case number of marks from [number of candidates] down to roughly [0.5*(number of candidates)], because when, say, a voter approves one more than half of the candidates, that can be counted with the special mark along with negative marks for the one less than half of the candidates disapproved by the voter, for a total of [0.5*(number of candidates)] marks, rather than this same number plus one. Of course, reducing the number of marks that need to be made doesn't always result in less work (manual or cognitive) overall.