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@lime you could also have a persistence diagram that shows the support level of each candidate at every possible cutoff. This produces “score proportion” profiles that indicate the fraction of voters who score each candidate at least a given score. It’s possible to define a dynamic threshold or even an integral across all thresholds.

@gregw that’s a good question, I think that would be a contingency clause. I’m no lawyer and I don’t know much of anything about those or the limitations about how they can be structured.

@Lime I agree with @Jack-Waugh. If we’re going to succeed in making any technical arguments then we will have to work with clear definitions and can’t afford to be loose with interpretations. It’s also dangerous territory to even bring up certain terms in the context of a legal argument, because terms that were previously undefined and may have left some room for interpretation are then liable to collapse into a narrower scope that sets a precedent. That means we have to be very careful, because if it gets screwed up once, it will be all that much harder to unscrew it in the future.

@lime well, people who oppose reform (aka those in power) will find ways to concoct detailed arguments against the adoption of any reform proposal, and questionable constitutionality is a low bar.

@jack-waugh that will work if everybody does it. However, it’s likely that people will not go through with that unless they have the same kind of discipline it takes not to constantly check stock values.

@gregw I honestly think approval voting is one of the best footholds we have for moving forward with actual voting reform. Especially considering the language you reference in the constitutions, it fits the bill. It may not be perfect but it’s miles ahead of choose-one voting and would have dramatically positive consequences if adopted. While IRV is a flawed incremental change, approval voting would be a real game changer.

Score will certainly be more questionable than approval in terms of the constitutional language. I think these kinds of practical constraints are likely to focus reformer support for approval.

@lime since we would be iterating through the edges that belong to cycles in order of ascending weight, any edge under consideration would automatically be the minimum weight edge of every cycle it is a part of. I think maybe it wasn't clear that equivalently, we can ask for each edge, "Is there some cycle to which this edge belongs?" If yes, it is in the search space of edges, and then we identify the edges in the search space of minimum weight.

Generally, whether an edge (u,v) belongs to a cycle can be checked by removing the edge and doing a (depth-first) search for a path from u to v, since (u,v) belongs to a cycle if and only if such a path exists.

But in any case it's just a concept, similar to Young's method and Dodgson's method, since it tries to perturb the ballot set in a conservative way until a Condorcet winner emerges.

@jack-waugh I think it would be best to have a multifaceted vote on voting systems. Here is the ballot format I suggest, since it can be flexibly transformed into ballots that are compatible with other systems.

Once the candidate voting systems under consideration are chosen, each voter should submit a ballot assigning each candidate an independent integer score ranging from 0 to 100. For scaling purposes, two pseudo-candidates who cannot win will be introduced to the election as well, one automatically receiving a 0 on every ballot, and the other automatically receiving a 100 on every ballot. Each voter will also submit an integer from 0 to 100 as their approval threshold, and scores above that threshold will count as an approval.

This way, we can examine the winner under various different systems using self-consistent ballots. We can also see which voting systems if any end up electing themselves, just for curiosity.

If the election gets organized well, I’ll participate.

@gregw said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

@toby-pereira said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

Using score ratios is always a bad idea. It only makes sense (as with utility scores) to look at the absolute difference between scores. If someone scores three candidates 0, 1, 2, then they are equidistant. To see the 1 as infinitely more than the 0 is bad voting method behaviour.
It would also be insane if (under a 0 to 5 ballot) if someone scoring two candidates 5 and 1 had less voting power in the run-off than someone scoring them 1 and 0.

Therefore, STLR’s leveled runoff is not a good idea, but it might be less bad using a 1 - 6 scoring range than a 0 - 5 range. Also, normalizing a ballot with scores of 4, 2, 1, and 0 to scores of 5, 3, 2, and 1, keeping the absolute differences, makes more sense. Call it STLR2? It would be a little easier to explain the regular STLR. Thank you for the help!

Well, if I was normalising, I would always stretch scores to fill the whole range. So every voter would have a 0 and a 5 in this case.

@lime said in Variable house sizes:

@toby-pereira said in Variable house sizes:

Also, looking at proportional voting methods rather than apportionment (which is more relevant if we're talking about the Holy Grail of cardinal PR), some countries are split into regions where they might each have 5 or so representatives elected (normally using STV). We would not be able to reduce this number in a particular region if doing so would give a more proportional result, because it would mean the entire region would be be under-represented nationally.

There's two reasons I still think this question would be relevant:

1. In some cases, there's more flexibility (if nothing else, small committees like city councils).
2. Even if we have to accept a fixed-size legislature, proving a method satisfies the core in the variable-size case would probably imply a nearly-satisfied core property in the case of a fixed-size legislature (think of how Webster satisfies lower quota 99.9% of the time). It could also lead to randomized methods that can satisfy the core with a bare minimum of randomness (requiring random selection or weighting only very, very rarely).

Also if we're using a candidate-based system (e.g. STV or a cardinal method as opposed to party list), it wouldn't make sense to talk about parties being over-represented since candidates would be elected in a party-agnostic manner. So to talk of quota violations would become meaningless.

Thus why I asked about whether we could guarantee the core instead, which seems like the most attractive generalization of quota for me. (As well as having very appealing strategy-resistance properties).

Methods that guarantee core stability are of interest to me (see this thread, which I linked to earlier) even if it's not my priority. From what I've read, I think it's still unproven that it's guaranteed that the core is non-empty. But if you use a stability measure (as suggested in the thread) rather than an all-or-nothing, it could be workable regardless.