@toby-pereira that's correct. And I believe that if this teaming is honest (the candidates are actually similar and don't want to spoil each other) then it is not the problem. Note that under standard (not spoiler-proof) voting rules, one of the candidates in the cycle could just quit the election, allowing the other candidate to win. We get rid of such strategic considerations here.

On the other hand, dishonest teaming shouldn't happen, since it is only profitable for the candidate who wins, not for the ones who lose nevertheless. Besides, in close battles, the very fact of dishonest teaming can outrage the voters (especially the supporters of the still losing candidate) and affect their preferences enough to change the whole situation.

@robertpdx said in Vote for 2 then Instant Runoff:

"Vote for 2" is a standard, well-accepted method for choosing two winners. And a runoff is the standard, well-accepted method for deciding between two candidates. So I propose to combine those two steps into a single election.

Right, well, that's an interesting point. If Vote for 2 then Instant Runoff can be sold to Joe Sixpack on account of its being based on well-accepted methods, but Approval cannot, because it is novel, then getting something better than FPtP/IRV in place may be better than nothing, in helping to replace the omnicidal regime with a people's regime.

@Jack-Waugh As I said before, I agree that advocating Score voting to social movements is on topic. Indeed, I recall at CES that Sara Wolk discussed projects by Equal Vote to help various political organizations set up Star Voting elections. I will also grant that it might be easier to influence a social movement as a member than as an outsider. However, I don't think that the Advocacy category should be used to recruit people for movements only tangentially related to electoral reform, or that have much broader scopes. Voting reform won't stay at the center of the discussion, because the broad scope of reasons to support or oppose that social movement will necessarily enter the conversation. It might technically stay on topic, but it will be off-focus.

@bternarytau

This is a little nitpicky, but the notation

P(f(k, e) = c)

implies that k is random (because if k is fixed, then this probability would have to be either 0 or 1), but this is not stated.

Assuming that there are finite possible seeds and that each seed is equally likely to be chosen, we could write:
P(f(k, e) = c) = sum over s in S (I_c(f(s, e)))/|S|,
where S is the set of seeds, I_c(f(s, e)) = 1 if f(s, e) = c and I_c(f(s, e)) = 0 otherwise.

For many methods, |S| might need to be chosen in a way that depends on some limited information about the election, in particular the number of candidates (since for there to be an even 3-way tiebreaker, |S| needs to be divisible by 3 and so on). Methods that are "routinely" non-deterministic (such as random ballot) might also require the number of votes to select |S|.

@rob said in Testing.... voting widget plugin dev:

@rob from my phone

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah [ballots "color":"#f50", "bgColor": "#cdf"]

@frenzed said in Hello from Ed Hitchcock, New Zealander in France:

We need politicians to work in cooperation in groups, because the other option is dictatorship.

I don't see how you arrive at that.

Unless you consider groups to include things like "the Senate," any a particular Congressional committee, or some sort of special interest group that concentrates on a single issue (e.g. the Sierra Club). But those aren't parties. Parties tend to encompass everything, that is, a politician is a member of one party to the exclusion of other parties. That makes everything tribal, as well as correlating things that aren't necessarily correlated in every voters' mind. (for instance, say I am anti-abortion but pro-gun control)

I like the idea that both voters and candidates can consider each issue independently. Parties tend to force them together.

The problem in the US (and in many jurisdictions) is that the elections system freezes out all but two estalished parties.

Sure. Duverger's law. That's because of plurality voting, which I think most of us consider "the enemy."

A recent election for mayor of San Francisco (where I live) had 8 candidates, none of which were affiliated with a party. This worked because there was a ranked choice election. (IRV is not perfect, but it sure is better than plurality).

Some of the candidates "teamed up", advertising together and such. (saying things like "whichever of us you put first, put the other one second") Various special interest groups endorsed one or more candidates, but the candidates weren't "members" of any group, at least not to the exclusion of other groups.

How is that dictatorship? Even if it is for a parliamentary type election (Senate, Congress, board of Supervisors, etc), I don't see how parties are needed or benefit anyone if the election method is resistant to vote splitting.

DfiyLe3UwAEY-HU.jpg

@denis-falvey Welcome! Thanks for sharing and discussing your work here!

@multi_system_fan Thanks. I'm working on adding some new things that will make it better, as well as tie it to the more traditional pairwise matrix view. For instance I want to allow both this thing, and the pairwise matrix to appear side by side, and support mouse hover effects for both of them. (you could also just view one of the other)

I did some hover effects on the matrix some years back, but it would be especially cool if you could have the two things side by side, and when you hover over a pair of candidates on the matrix, or the connector line between the candidates on the "mesh" display, it would highlight relevant things in both graphics at once.

(this is for voting for restaurants, as we did at a previous job I had where they ordered lunch for us every day and we'd always waste time arguing about which one to get each day)
alt text

I'm convinced that allowing people to visualize this stuff quickly makes it less scary to them. Nobody wants to sort through tons of data, a picture can make a big difference.

A pairwise matrix without colors and hover effects / animation is extremely hard to make heads or tails of.... but all the better if you can show a simpler-seeming graphic that has each candidate on it only once.

@rob I think it would also be interesting to get votes on what forum users consider the most important aspects of a voting system.

It would also probably be useful to get some kind of informal map of different voting systems plotted on a spectrum of relative characteristics. I think a triangular spectrum of stable vs. simple vs. consensual could be a good place to start.

@toby-pereira
Well I'd have to write a program to generate examples because I did a trivial example with 10 seats, 60 voters for Party A, 30 voters for Party B, and 10 voters for Party C, and even that was tedious to do by hand, even though it seemed to work correctly.

@toby-pereira Yes, and if only extremists show up, they deserve the power.

@isocratia said in Vertical composition of multiwinner approval methods:

My basic use-case for this technique is when the first phase is simple bloc approval voting that filters out anyone with more than, say, 75% disapproval (this threshold is a parameter), and the second phase is some proportional approval voting method.

I would do the opposite: filter out anyone who would skew proportionality then apply a single winner method.

@cfrank I think it's more of a multi-election system, and it's kind of orthogonal to whether there are multiple winners or what method is used to determine the winner (plurality, RCV, etc). It's about how many votes you can cast on a given issue, for situations where "one person, one vote" is effectively unfair to minorities who are affected more sharply then the majority by a particular question. (Disclaimer: this is all just my impression and I might have it totally wrong.)

So if you're on a city council and you'll be voting on 100 bills this term, and a lot of them are about stuff in other districts that you don't care much about, but a few are really important in your district, you could use more of your allotted votes on the ones you care about, so you're less likely to get overruled by people who don't know or care as much about it.

In some variants, each vote costs money, so a billionaire can buy as many votes as they can afford. But at $1/vote, even if they spend $500M to get 500M votes, they could only overrule sqrt(500M)=22,360 people who disagree and spend $1 each on their votes. So it's a way to allow people to buy as many votes as they want if there's an issue that's super important to them, but without letting the wealthy become dictators.

@cfrank Yeah, there's always the incentive not to vote for a preferred candidate in PR for the reasons you give.

With the monotonicity, Phragmén is not actually non-monotonic as I say, but only weakly monotonic. E.g. with 2 to elect:

100 voters: ABC
100 voters: ABD

Phragmén methods tend to be indifferent between AB and CD (unless modified in some way), and that leaves them open to:

99 voters: ABC
99 voters: ABD
1 voter: C
1 voter: D

Where CD would be preferred. Electing in a greedy sequential manner rather than optimally would actually lead to more monotonic results in these cases, but other examples can be found.

@cfrank $50+ for an ebook is excessive. Is this a college text book?

@jack-waugh said in On one-sided strategy:

@lime said in On one-sided strategy:

@jack-waugh said in On one-sided strategy:

Give your favorites the top score and your most hated the bottom score. If you have a compromise candidate, and if you are convinced that your favorites are very unpopular or unknown, exaggerate the score of the compromise candidate almost up to the next higher candidates, but not quite up to them.

In practice, this is the same as thresholding, assuming you rate your compromise close enough to perfect.

What you mean, "rate"? In my heart, or on my ballot?

On your ballot.

Kristofer set up a browseable archive:

https://munsterhjelm.no/km/yahoo_lists_archive/

The forums I've archived have at least one message with at least one of
the terms "center squeeze", "Condorcet", "d'Hondt", "favorite betrayal",
"monotonicity", "Range voting", "Ranked Pairs", Sainte Lague", "Schulze
method" or "Score voting".

The browseable parts have the /web/ foldername:

https://munsterhjelm.no/km/yahoo_lists_archive/sd-2/web/2005-April/by-date.html

https://munsterhjelm.no/km/yahoo_lists_archive/sd-2/web/2005-April/msg00013.html

So far as I know, this is resolved.

@Ted-Stern said in Preference Approval Sorted Margins:

I would have thought that anyone interested in ranked methods would know the basics of Condorcet.

I have no interest in Ranked methods. Sorry