There are a few alternative voting systems to chose from, for how elections will work in democracies. Scoring seems to be the best one. But I haven’t heard anybody discuss negative votes.
f people could turn up just to vote against a candidate, or against all candidates, then a lie more people would turn up to vote.
Additionally, very unpopular candidates would no longer win elections.
Take Trump vs Clinton for a good example. Both were very unpopular. Many people were not really voting for one, but against the other.
In a system with negative votes, both of them would have finished with negative totals. A third party candidate with the most broad support would have won.
This shows how a system with negative votes could lead to a better (and more democratic) outcome. But is there a flaw or drawback? Why is this type of system not more favoured?
That sounds like a fine way to vote. Score voting like a generalisation of other types. The voter can chose to rank his choices 2, 1, 0 like STV. He can give all the acceptable candidates the maximum score like approval. He can just give one vote to a single candidate like FPTP. It still works fine whatever way voters are most comfortable using it.
Except that the independents would get 0 while Trump gets -1. So the hated candidates get a lot of negative votes. They are at a big disadvantage compared with today. So the result is just like Approval and the most universally acceptable candidate gets the most votes.