@casimir again this is just a criticism of the law and the judgment made about it: I still think even their reasoning (in bold) is pretty absurd. It means essentially that any system whatsoever that gets put into use is automatically constitutional, regardless of any negative or unexpected consequences, even those that directly contradict the letter of the law 😂 So what is the point of the law? It seems only to prevent the use of unconstitutionality to enact technical voting reform.

@toby-pereira I agree with this. Something in that spirit I am considering is that the power allocations can still be traced back to ballots. For example, if the seated representatives and powers were {A:45, B:35, C:20}, in principle, those single seats could be subdivided into multiple seats of roughly equal power, depending on the candidate pool (i.e. how many candidates are available).

Possibly, a sub-election could be run to determine the representatives within the A:45 group, etc. Maybe they could be given 4 seats, the B:35 group 3 seats, and C:20 2 seats. That could refine representation, some candidates might pick up multiple seats. It’s probably getting messy and complicated, it essentially becomes a hierarchical partitioning of ballots. I’m not sure what to make of that prospect, it starts looking like a network/phylogenetic tree or forest architecture, and that can become arbitrary fast.

I do see what you mean. An individual voter may actually prefer a particular coalition of candidates, rather than just want to get their top guy in. I wonder if non-strict rankings and distributed power would mitigate this issue, or for instance, if the A:45 group's sub-election guaranteed a seat for A, and ran the election on the remaining candidates, that might align with the spirit of preference for whole coalitions.

You definitely are more familiar with this space than I am, so I wager some of my objections may be non-issues when one considers alternative PR methods. But it seems to me that in this case, pushing for coalitions that respect single individual preferences for whole coalitions can lean toward reduced diversity and reduced minority representation. Is that inaccurate? Or is that a common tradeoff issue in PR systems?

“Would the weighting purely count towards their voting power in the elected body, or does it have other effects such as more time to speak?”

Yeah, it does beg some questions.

EDIT: After multiple adjustments made to guard against clone dependence and tactical voting, there is a non-monotonicity issue in my latest version (/branch, it is not my original concept so I don’t claim ownership in any way), where a minority faction can gain strictly preferred representation in the form of a seated candidate by merely withholding approval for that candidate. I have a concrete example of this, and may try to see how to address it. It may be due to something unnecessary.

@SaraWolk Test 2 nesting replies

@SaraWolk said in Calling for the Next Council Meeting!:

I propose we meet next on Wednesday Feb 17th, at 7:30 Pacific.

Hi All, I'm confirming and reminding you all that we have our next forum meeting tomorrow at 7:30 PST.

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Please invite people who would make great moderators.
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@tec said in Proxy:

This seems a lot like liquid democracy,

Schemes involving proxy power indeed resemble one another to at least that degree, that they involve proxy power. I would like readers to evaluate them separately, and not tar one with the drawbacks they see in another. And in particular, I live in the US, and am concerned about the effect on the world of US politics, and I would like other US residents to weigh in on my suggestions.

I propose that proxy would only be given in voting booths, with the same ballot secrecy as US people are accustomed to for voting on who can serve in office. And the opportunity would only come up every two years. Proxy could not be revoked except on those opportunities. This would limit the overhead costs of communication and certification of the expressed wills of the citizens. It would limit the risk of votes and proxies being coerced out of citizens.

Here is another variant of my proposal, which could reduce overhead. Instead of having to go to the polls once to allocate space in the legislative chamber to representatives and returning to the polls to give proxy to someone from among those seated, with this variation, only one visit to the polls per election season would be necessary. Voters would fill out two sections on the ballot. The top section would list the candidates and invite approval or disapproval of each for seating. In the bottom section, the voter would list candidates in order of that voter's decision about giving proxy. The highest candidate on the voter's list who is seated would receive that proxy.

@Jack-Waugh @Marylander
Sounds good to me.
Thanks for looking into it. I don't think it's time sensitive or anything, just thought I'd flag it here as a feature request.

Nice to have our categories all sorted out so clearly with a spot for these types of questions. 🙂

I haven't had much time to engage here on the forum since we launched, but I've been sending people over and it seems like there are conversations happening!

Looking forward to having more time to invest here soon.

When the forum was originally set up Jack just put it all in his own name as a stopgap, but that was never the permanent plan.

At the last meeting we discussed funds and bookkeeping and managing of that kind of thing and decided to do that through Equal Vote so we don't need a whole separate person/process for treasury and bookkeeping. They also voted to coalition unanimously (I abstained.)

The other reason mentioned was the "What if I get hit by a bus" issue, so we have been in the process of moving the forum into the fold of Equal Vote assets to ensure that passing of keys can be ensured, and adjudicated if needed, should anything happen to whoever has it in their name currently.

As part of that I've put in a bunch of hours over the last month on the back end and we now have the url on our the Equal Vote account and are paying for it from Equal Vote. Donations for the Forum can also be made to Equal Vote with earmarking for the Forum if desired. We also obtained a grant from Azure that can pay for the hosting, so the plan is to move the hosting there.

Again, Voting Theory Forum is still fully autonomous and this is a service that Equal Vote can offer and is happy to provide since we already manage this stuff for a number of other sites in our network.

I've just been looking through old threads and found this one.

@nevinbr said in Least-bad Single-winner Ranking Method?:

Objectively, the answer is Game Theory Voting. However, it is basically impossible to explain to, well, anyone.

This method was also discussed at greater length on the old CES Google Group here. But the point is that while it is optimal in the sense that you might want to optimise this one particular thing, you might not want to optimise that one particular thing, so it would be wrong to say that it's objectively the best method.

In fact, when you look at what it is trying to achieve, it becomes quite clear that it's really just a bit of game theory fun rather than a method seriously trying to optimise something that a human would want to optimise. And you can see that by an example that you gave in the CES thread.

To expand on that last point, consider the following election with 3 candidates and 100 voters:

49 ABC

48 CAB

3 BCA

This has a Condorcet cycle:

A beats B by 94

B beats C by 4

C beats A by 2

At first glance, we notice that A has the largest victory and the smallest defeat, as well as the highest Borda total. However, the GT method elects A just 4% of the time.

Can that really be optimal?

Let’s think about it.

Okay, B gets crushed by A and barely squeaks by C. We don’t want to get crushed because that is bad for our long-term average, so B probably should not win. And if B loses (or didn’t run at all) then C defeats A.

It seems that A’s victory over B is mostly ephemeral. As much as we would like to score that +94 to improve our long-term average, the only way it happens is if we pick A and the system we’re up against picks B. But since B shouldn’t win, we expect the other system won’t pick B either.

In particular, if we usually pick A and the other system usually picks C, then we are going to lose frequently. We would rather be that other system and pick C most often, which is exactly what GT does. The optimal distribution is:

A wins 4%

B wins 2%

C wins 94%

Moreover, in any 3-way Condorcet cycle, the probability of each candidate winning is always proportional to the margin of victory between the other two candidates. And this is provably optimal.

In the example ballots, it seems clear that A is the best winner. However, under this method, because B definitely isn't a good winner, other methods won't select B so the A>B pairwise win might as well be ignored. Better concentrate on A v C instead and since C wins that, C is the overall best pick.

So what this method does is not pick the candidate that is somehow judged to be best for society, but the candidate that has the best average margin of victory against a candidate picked by another method playing this same game. And this method would never lose on average against another method (though obviously might tie - e.g. against itself). I don't see how this optimality relates to real life at all and why it would be good for us to adopt it.

To make this clear, the ranked pairs method is a Condorcet method that a lot of people like. But I could devise a method that elects a candidate that pairwise beats the ranked pairs winner whenever one exists. Otherwise elect the ranked pairs winner. According the metric used here, this method is better than ranked pairs - when these two methods are viewed as the only choices at least. But is this method better tban ranked pairs by any reasonable measure? Of course not.

An interesting academic exercise, but nothing more. Certainly not objectively the best single-winner voting method.

@jack-waugh You can also draw parallels to referendums or judge elections where you can vote for or against each item, or abstain.

@brozai right there can be, but there isn't always. When there isn't a single Condorcet winner or Copeland winner, as often as not there are three that are tied.

And me. No CPU, No Photocell, that's what I wanted to post about.

@brozai Received!

Reminder -- these happen every Tuesday.

@andy-dienes Thanks this is good, I like your groupings. I'd also like to hold votes that are more specific, such as "for a condorcet method, what is your preferred tiebreaker approach?" With possible answers combining ballot type (ranked, ranked allowing duplicates, rated 0-100, rated 0-5) and tiebreak tabulation method (irv, plurality, borda, score)

I don't want to do anything that requires a different log in or cookie or whatever, I'd like to know where the votes are coming from, and discourage people from voting more than once or voting if they don't even introduce themselves or participate in the community otherwise. So I'd prefer just collect the ballots manually for now, from posts and signatures here, and maybe posts on reddit's EndFPTP forum. There's also the election methods mailing list....

Remember that we can do a new one at any time, and anyone in the group can post one. I'll happily tabulate them and show pretty results and share my work on a forkable codepen , at least to get people started. Anyone is free to retabulate.

I was hoping to collect high-resolution cardinal ballots. I'd suggest rate on a scale of 0-10, decimal places allowed e.g. 5.76. If anyone wants to use a different scale, such as 0 to a million, fine, whatever...it will just be normalized anyway. And then we'll show results in a bunch of different methods. People can supply an approval threshold, if none supplied it defaults to 5. So mine might look like:

Copeland/IRV [10], Ranked Robin[9.5], Any Condorcet [9], Copeland/Normalized Score [8.7], Copeland/Score [8.5], Cardinal Baldwin [8], IRV [6], STAR [5], Approval [3], Score [2], Borda[1], FPTP [0] ApprovalThreshold: 4

(that's using what is in my signature, but some of the groupings don't make sense for a real poll, especially "any condorcet")

I'll show some ideas for the pretty results display (hopefully with some interactivity or ability to animate or whatnot) soon. You may have seen some of my work in this direction....here's a some of it: (the Sankey diagram for IRV in the upper left isn't mine but it is uses an open source library to generate them)screenvoting.png

@rob said in An idea to increase activity at this forum:

That said, in the perfect world, yes there would be a nice voting widget.

I'm gradually working toward that. I have experimented with running custom js in this forum and looking for things in posts that I can parse and replace and add interactivity. . (@Jack-Waugh has been trusting enough to allow me privileges so I can do that.... but currently nothing is running) Automatic server-side tabulation and external storage of poll data would come later if people stay interested. It's doable, but not needed to get it started.

Do you know javascript or typescript? 🙂

@rob yup, both those statements are correct!

@rob said in project to make ballot data available:

those who do know how to code can tailor them so non-coders can just paste ballots in

OK. So that's basically collaboration where coders empower non-coders to participate in the research.

Spreadsheets don't have the ability to build on the work of others

Agreed. The don't compose at all. Every spreadsheet is an idiosyncratic work.