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A parable —Fortunately for me, I live in a county that has left behind the two-party lock-in of plurality voting. Because of our rallying and protests, I get to vote for whomever I want. Thanks to simple score voting, I can give as many candidates (up to 20, since we can’t hog the election booths voting for everybody in the phone book) as I want between 1 to 10 votes. They each can get 10 of my votes (allocating 100% endorsement), or 9 (allocating 90% endorsement), or 8 (allocating 80% endorsement), and so on, of my vote. So there is absolutely no two-party lock-in. I know precisely how many of my votes I am potentially wasting because of the spoiler effect. Therefor I have a simple and practical available strategy to disrupt the two-party lock-in.
Based on degree of preference, I will give Cynthia McKinney 10 votes, and Ralph Nader 10 votes. And based on degree of preference combined with degree of perceived attainability, will give and Jesse Ventura 9 votes. Based on degree of rejection combined with degree of perceived attainability, I will give Barack Obama 8 votes. I don’t want to give any votes, or advantage, to the hideous Mitt Romney, so I simply ignore his candidacy.
Unlike the majority of hapless Americans, strategic voting is available to me, and I intend to use it. I will not vote “sincerely” or “honestly” (that is, heroically and foolishly).
And NO! I will NOT put my pen and paper ballot into some infernal electronic machine! Politics combined with technological complexity always percolates into conventional political complexity. And political complexity always breeds total corruption.
I will not protest the Janus-face “parties!” I will protest the fraudulent elections themselves.
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Until we get simple score voting, and machine-free vote casting and counting, the multitudes of modern era liberals will be somewhat foolish to waste their time and energy contemplating political issues. So of course all we will mostly hear will come from fake liberals working to keep the majority of real ones sound asleep.
(You can read or write comments below.)
Simple Score Voting — Democracy Was Always Sabotaged 
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The term is just “Score Voting” or “Range Voting”. If you want to explicitly focus on the highest total sum version, instead of average, you can just say “sum-based Score Voting” or what have you. That distinction is rarely of much significance compared to the larger issue of just GETTING Score Voting. Score Voting is very simple regardless of whether you use sums or averages or a quorum, so the term “Simple Score Voting” is not a good descriptor.
Well, Clay, I apologize for taking six months to answer this! No responses came in for so long that I just gave up looking for them.
I completely disagree with your statements regarding the term “simple score” and the meaning of “very simple”. Simple score means:
(+) No machines are to be needed to cast or tally the votes.
(+) The nature of the voting method should be so simple to understand that there is no space for doubts or uncertainties.
(+) It must be possible and reasonable for hand counted paper ballots to be tallied at the voting stations, immediately announced, and then forwarded to larger tallying (or tabulation) centers. All tallying must require no operations other than simple addition (be additive).
Simple score is called “simple” because it makes fulfillment of all of the above “criteria” just as simple as possible. There is no averaging. There is no zero “0” ballot choice. And so on.
Simple score voting can be completely described in one short simple sentence: Give no vote at all, or from one to ten votes to any number of candidates you wish (up to some reasonable limit, say 20 candidates), and then simply add all the votes up.
The terminology of the election methods theorists is a disaster area. For example, score voting is claimed to be more “expressive” than approval voting. For some readers it will be helpful to explain that “approval voting can be completely described in one short simple sentence: Give no vote at all, or just one vote to any number of candidates you wish.” Election methods theorists are fond of saying that approval voting is a special case of score voting. In an abstract mathematical setting, that makes sense, but in the real world, they are vastly different. These theorists also often say that if all voters vote artfully (strategically), score voting effectively becomes approval voting, since they will give the lowest possible score (or no score at all) to candidates they do not “approve” of — but it is easy to show that this is absurd. Now we can consider an example of their problem with terminology.
Election methods theorists often claim that score voting is more “expressive” than approval voting, since there are more available choices. (Voters can input more information to the system.) It’s difficult to believe they manage to think this way! Consider — suppose I give you a choice — I will gift you a lottery ticket on which I have already written in the number — or alternatively, gift you a lottery ticket on which you can choose the number yourself. Which is the better deal? The second option clearly offers you “infinitely” greater “expressiveness” — but absolutely no greater value. Imagine you are in an ancient Roman Colosseum facing two boxes, one containing an attractive lady, and another containing a man-eating tiger — you obviously only have two choices. But you could get a better deal. You could have a choice of ten boxes, one with an attractive lady, and another nine boxes containing man-eating tigers. Clearly, with ten choices you now have a situation offering much greater “expressiveness”.
The terminology disaster just goes on and on with these election methods theorists. I simply say that score voting is very much more differentiative for choice of candidates — not more “expressive”. The election methods theorists are doing the world a grave disservice by failing to point out that their totally impractical systems are strictly mathematical constructs which should never be offered as real solutions to the disaster of the election spoiler effect that inevitably engenders a two-party system.
Below is an item I recently posted in Portland Indymedia:
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Portland Indymedia — Today’s “Democracy” Is Merely A Mask For Tyranny. Why Bother To Vote? — 11/23/15
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2015/11/431050.shtml
Get out and PROTEST the old single-selection two-party system!
We have the old single-selection two-party system. So there is no real choice at all.
Simple score voting is the only answer, and it can be completely described in one short simple sentence: Give no vote at all, or from one to ten votes to any number of candidates you wish (up to some reasonable limit, say 20 candidates), and then simply add all the votes up.
Also we must abolish election machines (such as voting computers). If they make casting and tallying 10 times faster, they make organized cheating 10 times easier as well. Which can we truly afford?
One could say that (strategic) simple score eliminates 90% of the spoiler effect. To illustrate: if a voter gives 10 votes to Nader and 9 votes to Gore, it is simply obvious that, if Nader does not win, the voter has only sacrificed exactly 10% of their voting power. Not 100% as they would have had they been forced to use the usual single-selection (“faux plurality”) voting method.
No fancy math is necessary to compare and contrast it to every other option for effectiveness and simplicity, including single-selection (aka “plurality,” our present “system”) Condorcet, Borda, IRV, Range (with its tricky “averages”), Approval (which is not adequately differentiative for choice of candidates), etc. These absurdly complex “alternatives” are merely make-work for scholars and lobbyists who usually do not really care at all about the general welfare of public.
The simple score method is the very simplest, since it only allows from 1 to 10 votes to be given, not from 0 to 9, or 0 to 10. That is simply another complication. It also has no vote-averaging that seriously complicates the “range” score method. I also seem t be the only one to point out that voters should always vote artfully (aka strategically), not artlessly or heroically (aka “honestly” or “sincerely”). The party-based versions of proportionate representation have failed completely in places such as Germany.
And the people MUST vote strategically — NOT artlessly (“honestly”, “sincerely”)! Do the Senators and judges act with honesty and sincerity? Do they vote heroically? Take a wild guess!
And why do you suppose they don’t have just ONE money-empowered candidate or party? Something to think about?
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