I’ll admit it – when the woman stopped me outside the library a few months ago to get my signature to add “STAR Voting” to our local ballot, I was enthusiastic. STAR Voting is a system where, instead of casting your vote for one candidate, you get to rate them all. Then, for the two highest-rated candidates, a second look at the ballots sees which of those two was favored by each of the voters, and they’re the winner. It’s a system that, according to its promoters, supports “More Voter Choice – Vote Your Conscience! – Never Waste Your Vote!” Mark Frohnmayer has written up a thorough explanation in favor of STAR Voting, here.

On Mother’s Day, though, when we sat down to vote (Oregon is 100% vote-by-mail), my husband was definitely not in favor. He’s a math guy who’s experimented with lots of voting systems, and he immediately saw a problem. The advocates of STAR Voting think that people will vote with their true preferences, but they’re expecting a rather measured voter mentality – and STAR Voting favors a more extremist temperament. So I gave it some more thought.

Let’s imagine an election with three candidates. (In an election with two candidates, STAR Voting is just a more complicated version of what we’ve got right now, so we need at least three to show its flaws.) In our imaginary election, let’s suppose that the Red party has one candidate, and although the majority doesn’t want him, those who do are very enthusiastic and hate the other two.

The Blue party has two candidates, and normally the stronger candidate would get almost all of the Blue votes, but let’s suppose the weaker candidate’s fans are excited about STAR Voting and want to show their support for their candidate, assuming the stronger candidate will win in the second round.

Let’s name the Red candidate Trump, the stronger Blue candidate Biden, and the weaker Blue candidate RFK-Jr. And just to make things simple, let’s pretend we have ten voters, but of course this is all basically the same if we scale it up to an actual voting population.

Of our ten voters, there are three who are enthusiastic for Trump. They rate him as 5, and they rate Biden and RFK-Jr as 0.

We also have three RFK-Jr fans. They rate him as 5, and they rate Biden and Trump as 0. Why do they rate Biden as 0, even though they prefer him to Trump? Because they’ve got caught up in the extremist rhetoric and think a “0” is the right thing to do. (STAR Voting incentivizes trashing the opposition, as we’ll see.)

Now let’s suppose that Biden’s four supporters are taking a more measured approach. Sure, they favor Biden, but they don’t buy into extremism, so they rate him as 3. They rate the other two as 0 because they simply don’t want them.

Normally, we’d have three votes each for Trump and RFK-Jr, and four for Biden, even if the RFK-Jr fans don’t remember that they’re really Blue party members who, under the usual voting system, would typically vote for Biden too. Even without them, Biden has the most supporters, so Biden wins.

With the STAR Voting, though, we now have 15 points each for Trump and RFK-Jr (since they each have three people scoring them as “5”), and 12 points for Biden (four people scoring him as “3”). Only Trump and RFK-Jr go on to the second round, and they’re tied (the downside to having only 10 voters).

But suppose one of those measured-temperament Biden voters thinks, “Ugh, I really don’t want Trump or RFK-Jr, but RFK-Jr isn’t as bad as Trump, so I’ll rate him as “1” on my 0-5 scale and keep Trump as “0”. Guess what? Now RFK-Jr is the winner.

My husband points out that this argument still assumes that all of the voters are being sincere. In this era, though, that’s not something we can take for granted. If the Trump voters really dislike Biden, they could campaign to have their supporters give “5”s to Trump and “4”s to RFK-Jr, such that a majority giving “3”s to Biden end up being outscored anyway, even without a competitive number of RFK-Jr supporters. So the STAR system encourages “strategic” voting too.

I read online today that STAR Voting has failed this time, but of course its creators and backers will keep trying. I hope they’ll take into account, though, that voters do have different temperaments.

STAR Voting measures enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can be manufactured.

And as my son put it when we were casting our ballots on Mother’s Day, people who think in more measured terms are generally more trustworthy. We want our voting system to support that, not to undermine it with incentives for extremism.