Now obviously we all espouse ranked voting, but the most popular rule—the single transferable vote—is known to sometimes eliminate candidates for getting too many votes, which is what happened in the 2022 Alaska special election (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Runoff_voting for an explanation of how this happens).
So, which voting rule do you like the most? I’m new to this world, but so far the Dowdall system seems like a good compromise.
Let’s say you get to cast 3 votes, and that I’m a corrupt politician. I’d put an issue that you care deeply about on the ballot with 3 other issues that you’re likely to care about. If I can engineer a ballot with 4 issues that you really care about, but only 3 issues that my coalition cares about, we can concentrate our votes while you’re splitting yours, and we win all 3 of the ones we deem important.
If voting were costly, you wouldn’t cast a vote just because you cared about the issue unless your side were also in danger of losing. If someone proposed a dummy bill to get you to waste a vote, but no one voted for the other side, you could refrain from voting either.
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for the media to run one-sided stories about how much support there is for one issue or another, to scare people into opposing it. You don’t know how many people voted for an issue until it’s too late to cast your own vote.
You wouldn’t know that it’s a dummy bill or no one voted for the other side.