@jack-waugh said in Voters’ Party:

That is for the voters to vet.

Right but if you are creating a new party it seems like you need to have a general idea of ideology (beyond the meta-issue if how you vote).

On the other hand, if the "ideology" of the party is to simply be centrist, I could get behind that. Methods that I consider good tend toward electing centrists. And in theory, a centrist candidate -- one that is essentially the first choice of the median voter -- might actually be able to win in a plurality election.

I could see a "Harmony Party", where the main goal of the party is to end the tribal politics, by nominating centrist candidates and advocating for better voting systems (that in turn tend to elect centrist candidates)

@rob I like this concept, I was also trying to consider the prospect of interstate pacts. In the case of less competitive states, an alternative voting system pact might be set to go into effect only once a sufficiently "large" group of states enter into the agreement (maybe measured according to their electoral college points as you suggest), which could easily negate the difficulties of diminishing federal influence when competing with a large FPTP block.

I think electors tend to be mostly faithful to the interests of their states (at least as far as can be determined by the gerrymandered districts), especially I think since they have the pressure of public scrutiny to more-or-less rubber stamp the results as they come in, and hopefully they also have some humility in their own decision-making powers and confidence in the larger process. I do think it gets problematic because entrusting electors to distribute their votes according to a less black-and-white indication of state interests does give them significantly more political power and responsibility that they will also need to be held accountable for. Generally I don't mind the concept of electors/representative arbiters as long as the incentives are sorted out. The way I see it all we can hope for is a system that consistently gives results that are good enough for national success, and if such a system does the job that'd be just fine with me.

I also think it’s a good sign that we’re at the point of discussing potential issues with real large-scale implementation.

@marylander said in Point about centrist candidates winning in cardinal PR methods:

If a tie in the legislature genuinely reflects a near deadlock of public opinion, 49.9% of the public getting their way over 50.1% is hardly a travesty.

I suppose, but I think that there could be interesting effects (some potentially negative, maybe) to think about in the context of the elections themselves if such a legislative tiebreaking rule were implemented. For example, in a 2-seat cardinal PR election, if the candidates are aware that the seat-winner who gets more score points will be given ultimate power in the 2-seat legislature, that would be an incentive to try to be more of a consensus candidate (to whatever extent possible without upsetting one's "base").

@jack-waugh said in Priorities in Simulating Voting Systems:

I see that the comparison you would most like to explore in the simulator I am working on is RCV IRV Hare vs. RCV IRV Bottom-two Runoff.

Yeah I wouldn't put too much in my preferences... I personally don't know of any effective strategies for those methods that would be reliable enough for many voters to use.

@jack-waugh said in Priorities in Simulating Voting Systems:

I understand both these systems to forbid equal ranking (so this is strict ranking or you could say total order).

Personally I consider that an implementation detail, not a requirement of either method. I don't consider it all that important, though.

@marcus-ogren Good point. The idea behind the Critical Score is to boost candidates with isolated support. It's possible that it goes too far, as you've highlighted. I just found that to sort of achieve the effect I was looking for, I would need a really big exponent for the Power Score.

I wonder how it all washes out in more realistic scenarios, but it's valid to consider someone putting themselves on the ballot and literally not telling anyone just to then score themselves 5 stars. Perhaps there's some kind of balancing that can be built in, but I suspect, on the general advice of James Quinn, that that would likely cause new problems.

@rob definitely man. It’s pretty ridiculous, I hope it can get fixed soon. It seems to be growing in public awareness, which is definitely a good thing.

@toby-pereira I totally agree with you here. And a point to supplement or maybe just reiterate your stance on “benevolent dictators,” there’s a definite survivorship bias there. The business dictators who fail don’t show up in the news, while the ones who succeed are often lauded as geniuses without due regard for the role of pure luck or factors totally unrelated to their supposed acumen. The same goes for stock market investors—many who come out on top end up believing they have a special intuition to “outsmart” the market, but when compared with randomly generated portfolios, their inclinations usually fare no better, and often do worse (due to their relative lack of diversity, they are not as robust against market volatility).

So basically, when uncertainty is involved, failure doesn’t always indicate a poor strategy, not any more than success indicates a good one. This reduces my confidence that business dictatorships actually tend to promote the success of a company.

Thanks for the replies everyone. My confusion was because I wasn't aware that the load could be spread arbitrarily. Interestingly I think this is equivalent to the idea of partially or wholly removing approvals that are detrimental to a candidate set's "score", which I suggested years ago, but seems to be a case of reinventing the wheel. There's quite a good discussion of Phragmén's voting methods in this paper by Svante Janson.

@culi I'm interested in this caching. Is it a programming pattern?

I vote red.

@jack-waugh said in Super-STAR: Dynamically rescaled score runnoff:

@lime said in Super-STAR: Dynamically rescaled score runnoff:

@kaptain5 The ideal would be to find a somewhat-objective normalization with a mechanism like quadratic voting or VCG. Each voter has to "pay for" their rating points by giving something up (like votes they could cast in another election).

No, because that's exactly the problem with choose-one plurality. I have as a voter the right to support and oppose so many candidates via my vote as I support and oppose in my political stance or judgment. Choose-one plurality single-winner voting says I have to pay a "cost", which is the entirety of my precious vote, as soon as I support one candidate. Support and opposition must be free of cost, because I am a citizen and deserve a full vote, the same as any other citizen.

I think the thread you linked is based on a misunderstanding. The quadratic voting penalty is applied across different races, not in the same one. So, for example, you can either cast 10 votes for President, or you could cast 5 for President, 5 for Governor, 5 in some ballot initiative, and 5 in Congress. (Adds to 100.)

The squared-cost penalty is chosen so you'll honestly reveal your relative preferences across different issues, under an impartial culture model. I assume you could do better than an impartial culture model, but the point is more that you should be able to trade influence across decisions to have a bigger impact on the issues where your preferences are stronger.

I know some of you will have seen that on EM, there has just been a poll of single-winner systems. Ranked Pairs with winning votes won the poll as the Condorcet winner and most approved. The margins version of Ranked Pairs wasn't in the poll though, so they weren't compared. See here and here for a breakdown.

@lime said in Simple anti-chicken modifications to score:

I promise you that nobody in the election-methods mailing list is particularly positive on IRV.

Yes, I have noticed that.

Most of the support for IRV is from the Alaskan model (Top Four & Final Five) proponents and their ally Fair Vote.

Fair Vote is promoting Proportional Racked Choice Voting in the Fair Representation Act (Rep. Donald Beyer, D-VA-8).

The Fair Representation Act (FRA) calls for Ranked Proportional Voting (SVT), FairVote claims:

"It’s straightforward for voters: Rank candidates in order of choice. Voters can rank as many candidates as they want, without fear that doing so will hurt their favorite candidate’s chances. Ranking a backup choice will never hurt a voter’s favorite candidate, so voters have no reason to vote for only one candidate."

This year's version of the FRA includes provisions for states with blanket primaries.

As with previous versions, FRA protects Voting Right Act of 1965 set aside districts. Frankly I think fair voting systems, especially proportional representation, will help minorities far more than set aside districts. Set aside districts are perceived by Republicans as a perfectly legitimate excuse to gerrymander like all hell.

The FairVote FRA pages give the impression the the chief purpose of proportional representation is to get more people of color, women, LGBTQ candidates elected.

To get Proportional Representation enacted we will need support from a good number of conservatives and Republicans. We should sell voting system reforms as color blind (they are), and fair. They will help minority representation by virtue of being color blind.

The FRA is now in committee, the speaker will decide when to let it out of committee, smart money is on never.

@lime Yes, a 50% cutoff could work as well. The difficulty is in selecting the non-compensatory criterion to reduce the size of the search space.

@toby-pereira very interesting. Many ancient cultures employed sortition for allocating responsibilities or making decisions, though perhaps this will be a more difficult sell without the appeal to "the will of the gods" becoming rhetorically effective again.

@kodos I've changed it so new users have to register with an e-mail address. I don't think that's too onerous, and it should make the problem go away.

@sarawolk said in Technical To-do List:

Ideally those two tasks would happen at the same time.

If we can get the images sooner rather than later, I might be able to get them to show up in the archive sooner, which would be useful for readers.

If we can get the updates to the posts sooner, that will also make the archive more valuable. I doubt whether anyone will be posting anything interesting to the old forum. I think just about everyone who might think to post there has had it drilled into them that that forum is supposed to be shut down and that we offer the present one as its replacement.

@Marylander "The emails appear to be coming from theory@votingtheory.org" -- Yes, I set that. They have to come from some e-mail address, even if it doesn't make particular sense to reply to that address. Maybe I should set up a "no-reply@votingtheory.org" address.

STAR needs to write a similar article to this.

https://newsdirect.com/news/open-letter-to-ranked-choice-voting-supporters-946993204

@rob said in Hello:

I know you think about candidates in absolute terms while I think relatively.

Not sure what you mean by thinking of candidates in absolute terms. I have always been emphatic that voters should score RELATIVE to the others on the ballot.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm not sure I understand your question (or what that has to do with it eliminating the negative effects of vote splitting, which to me is a completely different issue than how you resolve one particular scenario).

Proof by counter example is a perfectly rigorous method for mathematical proof. I pointed out a scenario where negative voting could not encode enough expression to resolve both vote splitting instances on the ballot. You reply by stating that Approval Voting (which I did not mention) will not encode all the information needed to resolve an issue unrelated to vote splitting.

@rob said in Hello:

The strategy is very similar to strategy in FPTP, but you've got more options.

Agreed. Vote splitting still exists but it is better than plurality voting.

@rob said in Hello:

I think it is common for voters to only have a strong opinion about a single candidate

This is what I was doubting in the last email. I would need some real evidence before I endorsed a system that baked that assumption into it.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm highly skeptical that various studies (that by necessity seek to answer very generalized questions) prove anything one way or the other, but I don't really care to debate that at this point.

I agree that it is hard to get a definitive answer. In the absense of a knowing I would stay away from restricting the expression of voters. This comes with a trade off in complexity where the spectrum is something like

plurality - Negative voting -IRV - Approval - Score - STAR

You need to be to the right of IRV to not have vote splitting and that is what I think is the most important.