In my mind it's something a little more subtle but to the same effect. I think that ordinal and cardinal voting systems attract/repel people with different psychological tendencies, probably not unlike the tendencies described here, related to tolerance for uncertainty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/.
Ordinal systems impose a strict rank on peoples' choices, whereas cardinal systems allow people to settle on superpositions of choices, to explicitly give up control.
To me, being forced to order my choices is an unfair imposition. I want to be able to say "I'd be okay with fish or vegan food, someone else who cares more should make the final call". I don't want Rob Richie telling me that I should vote for fish over vegan food because I happen to really like fish. In doing that, I'd be alienating my vegan friend, and because I'm totally up for eating vegan food, I find it unacceptable to be pressured into ranking one over the other. This is the very dynamic that creates splitting, and I'm offended by it.
Being forced to rank my choices is unnatural to me, but I've heard ordinal voting advocates claim that ranking choices is natural and intuitive to everyone/most people, even after sharing my position that it feels funny. Go figure.
I'd expect ordinal voting advocates to be more likely to agree with statements like "everyone has a favorite color".
A good ranked choice system like Schulze, avoids that issue.
You can give multiple people the same rank, to express no preference between them. So you could have two or more choices you don't want to express an opinion between both marked 1, then perhaps the lesser but still acceptable candidates marked 2, the unacceptable candidates as 3, and extremely unacceptable candidates as 4.
Meanwhile, somebody else can come along and rank all the candidates with a unique number if they prefer.
In Schulze, all the numbering is doing is expressing who you would pick in a one-on-one race any pair of candidates.
Ranking candidates the same (tied), simply means you would have left that question blank on a traditional FPTP ballot because you don't care which of the two wins, either because you find them equally good/bad or you feel they sufficiently close that you would prefer to let those who care more decide.
For example, I don't own a home, or have kids, so i will usually leave school property tax levy questions blank. I may have some super slight preference one way or another, but I'm mostly unaffected, so I will let those who actually care about this decide.
Ordinal systems impose a strict rank on peoples' choices, whereas cardinal systems allow people to settle on superpositions of choices, to explicitly give up control.
To me, being forced to order my choices is an unfair imposition. I want to be able to say "I'd be okay with fish or vegan food, someone else who cares more should make the final call". I don't want Rob Richie telling me that I should vote for fish over vegan food because I happen to really like fish. In doing that, I'd be alienating my vegan friend, and because I'm totally up for eating vegan food, I find it unacceptable to be pressured into ranking one over the other. This is the very dynamic that creates splitting, and I'm offended by it.
Being forced to rank my choices is unnatural to me, but I've heard ordinal voting advocates claim that ranking choices is natural and intuitive to everyone/most people, even after sharing my position that it feels funny. Go figure.
I'd expect ordinal voting advocates to be more likely to agree with statements like "everyone has a favorite color".