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"Compressed Middle" — everything 2s and 3s, nothing extreme

Mild preferences, honestly recorded. No candidate gets full marks, none gets a zero, and the whole ballot fits in a one-point band.

← One of thirteen voting styles. Every style is legal and counted; this page is what this one means, when it fits, and what it trades away.

A STAR ballot with all scores in a narrow band: Andre 3, Blake 2, Carmen 3, David 3, Ella 2 — no 5s and no 0s.

What this ballot says

"They're all roughly fine. I lean slightly toward Andre, Carmen and David, but nobody here excites or alarms me." It's the ballot of a voter with real but small preferences, who declines to manufacture larger ones.

When it fits

  • The race genuinely is low-stakes to you, or the field is genuinely uniform — a slate of similar, competent people.
  • You dislike the feeling that scoring is shouting, and you'd rather your ballot said something proportionate.
  • You're rating on an absolute scale by instinct ("nobody here is a 5") rather than relative to the field.

The trade-off, honestly

STAR's two rounds treat this ballot very differently, and the asymmetry is the whole lesson.

In the scoring round, influence is measured in points. A voter who spreads 5 to 0 contributes five points of separation between their favorite and their last choice; this ballot contributes one. So its say in who reaches the final is genuinely, arithmetically small — not discounted by any rule, just quieter by its own choice.

In the runoff, influence is measured in direction. A 3-over-2 is a full vote, exactly as strong as a 5-over-0 — the runoff asks which way you lean, never how far. So a ballot that whispered about the finalists shouts about the winner.

Two consequences worth knowing. First, this is not a weak ballot; it's a ballot that is weak in one round and at full strength in the other. Second, if you want more say in who makes the final without inventing opinions you don't have, stretch only the ends: your genuine favorite to 5, your genuine last choice to 0, everyone in between exactly where your honest opinion puts them. You'll have invented nothing — the Equally Weighted Vote guarantees no style out-muscles another, and a wider honest spread is simply your own opinion at full volume.

The one thing to avoid is compressing so far that the band collapses. A ballot where every candidate has the same score stops saying anything at all — that's the Null Ballot, one step past this one.

This exact style in a real election

In the runnable five-more election, the compressed row is 2,2,3,2,3 — a single point between best and worst. It barely moved the scoring round. But in the Clara-versus-Alice runoff, its 3-over-2 was one of only two full votes cast out of five ballots (the other three were Equal Support) — so the quietest ballot in the election turned out to be half the decisive margin.