@michaelossipoff Great. But I think readers are likely not to notice the activity in this thread, which started as a set of proposals about forum governance by a participant now banned. To try to get more attention, let's move the discussion of voting on voting systems to https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/466/polling-ourselves . I posted my updated nominations there, for one of the categories. Thanks for reviving the topic of voting on voting systems.

@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.

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

@matthewmvp said in Hybridizing SPAV?:

According to my wikipedia education, one of the issues with SPAV compared to PAV is that it is a 'greedy algorithm' that only looks at the most locally optimal solution.
Now SAV considers the whole field at once but doesn't fix under and over votes.

AFAIK Sequential SAV and Sequential PAV are the same procedure, which is actually the trick I use to explain SPAV more intuitively: I describe SAV, then explaining how SPAV fixes the spoiler effect in SAV.

Did you read the SAV Wiki article in the past week or two? I tried explaining this way of thinking about SAV in the article to make it simpler, but might have unintentionally made it more confusing instead of less.

I vote red.

The governing coalition opted for true open lists. Phragmén-MMP would be better because most of us like the idea of independent candidates.
Though open lists are still better than MMP with runoff.

@lime I don’t think any of the points are actually valid except the last one, with the addendum that Democratic representatives are just as likely to stall or derail voting reform efforts, because they also benefit directly from lack of accountability to public interests.

@toby-pereira

Yes, but the big winner, so far, in the burial-deterrence category, is RP(wv), which isn't a new-invention method, but, rather is a traditional, classical, immensely popular & high-prestige method.

FairVote claims that "RCV" doesn't have a spoiler problem. It most blatantly does.

FairVote claims that your ballot will help your 2nd choice if your 1st choice doesn't win. False, & FairVote knows that.

FairVote says that it isn't known whether Condorcet has a spoiler-problem.

No, actually MinMax(wv), & then Smith//MinMa(wv) were introduced 35 years ago, & their strategy-properties were well studied & well-known at the time. It was known even then, that the wv Condorcet methods, which also include Schuilze & RP(wv) meet Minimal-Defense, & that truncation by only one faction can't take the win from a CW.

Those things have been well known among Condorcetists for 35 years. No, Condorcet(wv) doesn't have a spoiler problem,

But FairVote has a dishonesty problem.

@toby-pereira said in Easy-to-explain Proportional (Multiwinner) elections:

By the way, Satisfaction Approval Voting can only be described as semi-proportional. You're wasting part of your vote on candidates that aren't elected. It's like SNTV except that you can split your vote up. They both have similar problems to FPTP.
They might be easy to explain, but they're not worth explaining!

You're right, of course, but that's why I like to bring up SAV as an "obvious" system with an obvious flaw (spoilers). Then I explain how PAV/SPAV fix that flaw with a minor change--split a vote only after a candidate is elected, not before.

@toby-pereira On a ranked ballot you can't show if a 2nd choice is as good as a 1st choice or as bad as a last choice. In practice, ranked methods have to constrain how many candidates can be ranked. There are a few different ways you can look at it, but here's why I think it's the most expressive on the table (excluding cardinal methods with a bigger range)

the ability to vote on every candidate no matter how many there are, The ability to show preference order The ability to show degree of support on a 6 rating scale.

I think I know what happen in NV.Your splitline hits the Ely State prison.
The block has 30% black population, 1% Turnout and size of 500.

@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:

While I don't think it would be a good method in practice

The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice 😄

@matija Ahh, I think I understand what you meant better now. Still, I'm not sure where the incentive for bullet voting comes from (at least in a realistic situation); approval thresholding is a more common (and more realistic) strategy for informed voters.

@anniek said in Good simple semi-PR methods?:

A group I'm tangentially connected to has decided to switch from sequential proportional approval voting to cumulative voting (voters are given a number of points equal to the number of seats, and each voter can give any amount of their available points to one or more candidates). I'm concerned because I have heard that cumulative voting is susceptible to vote-splitting and bullet voting. Where can I learn more about these effects in cumulative voting?

The main problem with cumulative voting is what happens if they don't do bullet voting. Cumulative voting produces kind-of-proportional representation if voters are strategic and perfectly informed, because minority groups can coordinate to bullet-vote. However, too much honest voting by these groups can easily result in a bare majority sweeping all the seats; in other words, requires some very complicated coordination (especially in small elections).

I don't think there are any proportional methods simpler than SPAV except party-list representation, or possibly sequential Ebert (although I'd consider sequential Ebert about as simple as SPAV).

Have you asked what makes this group think of SPAV as "too complex?"

Let's say there are 5 candidates and a voter bullet votes for their favourite. According to the m-rule (the "good" way), the points would be 1, 0, 0, 0, 0. According to the n-rule (the "bad" way) it would be 4, 0, 0, 0, 0 (or equivalently 5, 1, 1, 1, 1).

But 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 would also be equivalent to 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, which doesn't really seem that good either and is biased against voters choosing not to rank all candidates (rather than being unbiased as claimed by the article).

I've always thought the most logical way is to average the ranks. So if 5 ranked candidates would get 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, then bullet voting should give 5, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5.

Interestingly, the KP Transformation, which is a way of converting approval methods to score methods, does not work on the basis that you can simply add up a voter's score for each elected candidate to see how satisfied they are. If scores are out of e.g. 5, then each voter essentially has 5 utility slots and the top one will only be satisfied by a score of 5. So two candidates with scores of 2 and 3 being elected will mean that 40% of the voter's utility slots will be untouched. A 0 and a 5 mean that all slots will be satisfied to some extent but none more than once.

I think the KP transformation is generally good because it gives maintains good criterion compliance when added to an approval method without adding nasty surprises. And it's simple. Essentially all of the debate between Allocated Score, Method of Equal Shares, TEA etc., are about what to do with these messy scores that are hard to deal with when you use a score method rather than an approval method. KP sorts that out simply with generally better criterion compliance. So the consideration of TEA versus those other methods then becomes irrelevant.

And as I mentioned in this thread, all the subtractive quota methods are really just weak approximations of Phragmén-based methods. So I'd use Phragmén + KP as the basic starting point of a method you have to do better than. If determinism isn't essential, you can do better still.