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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 2060933" data-attributes="member: 1264">Yes, a ranking allows the voter to express more information about their preference - including abstentions. Doesn't mean that information is actually used correctly though!The standard IRV as you are proposing treats abstentions as bottom-of-the-barrel votes! Yes, it is as bad as that. Let's say there are two unknown products on a ballot. At least if you were to rank those #4 and #5 out of 5, one of them would get a miniscule chance of ever coming into play. But if you abstain on both of them, they will always be treated as worse than the very worst vote on your ballot. In the simple IRV case, an abstention is *always* a down-vote, just like in a standard winner-takes-all election. Now, it is possible to come up with more sophisticated variants of IRV or other ranked voting methods, where the quality of the candidate is only measured across the voters who have actually expressed an opinion about it. Somewhat along the lines of what we were trying to achieve by looking at the mean score last year (whereas standard IRV looks at the sum of the first-choice votes each round). But that does get more complicated, and it's typically equivalent to the system extrapolating what you would have voted, based on what other people have voted for that product. In that case, as a voter I would much rather be able to make a ball-park estimate myself!Spoken as someone who prefers a ranked system. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Of course, Approval Voting doesn't actually use ranking, so claiming that it "ranks" the unknowns together with all the good ones or all the bad ones is a little biased. Might as well complain that an exact ranking forces you to state that the differences between subsequent ranks are equal, even though you might have preferred to score them 10-3-2-1-1.I would rather say that Approval Voting allows you to  split the candidates into two groups: acceptable or unacceptable. If you want to say that any of those unknown products is acceptable over one you know is crap, that is an acceptable choice.Yes, ranked voting captures more information, but IRV actually winds up throwing most of that information away anyway, since in any round it only takes the 1st-choice votes into account. Which is why compromise candidates with few 1st choice votes are often dropped early on. Plus it is still open to strategic voting, meaning that it may be in your best interest to rank your favorite candidate lower than a more widely popular one.In the end, it may all come down to what we are willing to implement, and what features we are willing to live with...- Very easy implementation, no bias against poorly known candidates: Approval Voting- Harder to implement, allows the voter to state his preferences in more detailed way, optimal voting strategy may be different from your actual preference ranking, biased against poorly known candidates: standard IRV- As above, but no bias against poorly known candidates, needs sophisticated statistics: some novel form of IRV</blockquote>

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