It’s really not about STEM vs cook. Voters are stuck compressing a huge range of choices into a single vote which creates horrific incentives for politicians. You can piss off huge swaths of the population as long as you can just squeeze through enough voters it doesn’t matter. Toss in a little inequality in how much each vote counts and things get much much worse.
Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you dislike the most. It’s not better but suddenly everyone wants to be an inoffensive centrist. Which just shows how much incentives influence the system.
> Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you disliked the most.
Would that work? If there are only two candidates, then it’s equivalent to casting the inverse votes for. If there’s three candidates, and one is literally horrid, then would people give all of their negative votes to the horrid candidate in fear of destruction and leave very few votes to differentiate the top two? Or, would voters cast all negative votes for one of the top two and hope enough _other people_ downvote the horrible candidate?
Sorry, I know your comment wasn’t meant to be serious, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
Consider what would happen if rather than voting for your favorite you subtracted points from the candidate you dislike the most. It’s not better but suddenly everyone wants to be an inoffensive centrist. Which just shows how much incentives influence the system.