New Paper: STAR Voting, equality of voice, and voter satisfaction

A bit over two years ago, I got in contact with Jameson Quinn to voice some concerns about how strategic voting was modeled in his Voter Satisfaction Efficiency simulations. He responded back, asking if I’d like to coauthor a paper with him — an opportunity that I jumped on. That paper, “STAR Voting, equality of voice, and voter satisfaction: considerations for voting method reform” has now been published. In it, we go over the basics of STAR Voting, why it should lead to less polarized outcomes than Plurality or Instant Runoff Voting and better reduce the importance of seeming “electable”, and present new Voter Satisfaction Efficiency results — with all of the concerns I had pointed out to Jameson properly addressed, and much more progress on top of that.

Some thanks are in order. To Jameson, for taking a chance on me and getting me involved in this project, and also for creating the really cool voter model used in our simulations. To Sara Wolk (the other author) for writing just about all of the article that wasn’t computer simulations and for going through countless revisions, making sure our writing was as clear as possible. Also, thanks to BTernaryTau for her formalism of the Equality Criterion. We messed up and failed to properly acknowledge her work in the paper, so I wanted to mention it here while we get this fixed in the actual paper. (Outside of the paper, I also used her work in formulating the strategic cancellation lemma.)