I am in touch with a group of people who think they are working on a platform for a national-level political party (I am a full voting member). They have heard of STAR and are acquainted with one or two people whose opinions they respect who favor STAR. I think I have convinced them that the platform should not call for a single voting system for all uses, on the grounds that circumstances differ and that State parties should decide based on the circumstances. The draft provisions being passed around in the group tend to mention more than one voting system. But, I want to convince them not to include any favorable mention of RCV/IRV whatsoever. What is the most convincing argument I can take to them that the risk of a spoiler effect is too high with IRV?
Jack Waugh
@Jack Waugh
Author of the code[1] that presents the archive[2] and the home page[3]. Also, I set up the hosting[4] and installed[5] NodeBB.
"William Waugh" in older fora on this subject.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/archive
[2] https://www.votingtheory.org/archive
[3] https://www.votingtheory.org/
[4] https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/sys_adm_ubuntu
[5] https://bitbucket.org/voting-theory-forum/root
Best posts made by Jack Waugh
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RCV IRV Hare
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RE: Transparency of https://www.votingtheory.org/
Thanks for pointing out that omission. The info has been available via published minutes of the forum council, but it's better to have a summary in the present category (which is whither the "About" button on the home page leads), so I posted it.
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RE: Ranked Robin Disadvantages -
Here is a ranking of forms of expression by expressivity:
- Least expressive: strict ranking.
- Middlingly expressive: ranking allowing equal-ranking.
- Most expressive: ratio scale.
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Weekly Live Q&A
Every Tuesday, at 20:00 New York time (16:00 UTC), @Sass answers questions on voting systems at bit.ly/democracy-discussions
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Mitigating Risks To This Forum
I see no low-cost, no-risk solution to a question regarding control of this domain name in case someone dies or otherwise becomes incapacitated. The domain registrar firm understands a relationship with an individual, and maybe a legal entity could be substituted for the individual. But as far as I know, creating a legal entity requires paying a lawyer, and I am unwilling to do that. But the current situation is that so far as the domain registrar firm is concerned, a single human individual owns this domain name. That individual has a credit card, the registrar is able to charge this credit card, and will do so if someone who knows the password orders more services. I am sure it is no surprise to any of you that I am that individual. With no arrangements in place other than these, the forum users bear a risk that I die from CoVid19 or getting run over by a truck or whatever (I am almost 70), and no one renews the domain, and so it expires, which would lead to the forum going under. So a possible solution is I could place trust in several of you to control the domain, and tell you the password, but then I would be effectively putting people I don't really know all that well in a position where they could hit my credit card. I suppose I could make some of you the executors of my estate in my last will and testament. Then you'd have to show the domain registrar your letters testamentary so you could take control of the account. I don't know whether the firm would respond in a timely fashion to such a communication.
The _equalvote.org_ organization has decided to accept this discussion forum as a partner organization. They are a legal entity (I guess) and so the obvious solution would be to transfer the domain name to their control. Then if whoever is in control of the server (again, that is currently I) become unresponsive and someone else has a backup and wants to bring up a new server with the data and code, they can just e'splain that to equalvote.org and it can point the domain name to the new server. I guess I would like to see some statement by active users of the forum that they are willing to trust equalvote.org to that degree, if that is going to be the solution.
@rob @paretoman @Casimir @Andy-Dienes @last19digitsofpi @masiarek @culi @rb-j @marcosb @BTernaryTau @BetterVoting @frenzed @Keith-Edmonds @Toby-Pereira @wolftune @Ted-Stern @wbport @multi_system_fan @Psephomancy @robertpdx @tec @Essenzia
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RE: Terms for Specific Voting Systems
@rob said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:
I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting".
I agree. I think it doesn't occur to most US people that more than one way to vote would be possible, and so it doesn't enter their mind to have a term for the way they do it as to be distinguished from possible other ways.
In one of the antisocial media, when I mentioned some alternative system, someone responded that that would be fake voting.
I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives". I put those terms in quotes because I am referring to people using those terms. I do not know what the users of those terms think the "conservatives" want to conserve or what the "liberals" want to liberate. I would use the terms without horror quotes if I stood ready to answer those questions should you ask them of me.
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RE: Technical To-do List
@Toby-Pereira Maybe I can get them with a limited form of screen scraping.
Or maybe @SaraWolk can prevail upon CES to give us the images. I have no sway to even get CES to acknowledge receipt of a message. While she is at it, she could also ask them for an updated dump of the other data, or just the items added or changed since they sent us the dump they sent.
The first image in that post, on the original site (implemented with Discourse) is rendered with a document element as the following HTML would specify:
<img src="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png" alt="Voters" data-base62-sha1="tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp" class="d-lazyload" srcset="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_865x748.png 1.5x, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/original/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33.png 2x" width="577" height="499">
The reference to it in the data dump that we received from CES and on which I base the archive, looks like this:
<img src="upload://tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp.png" alt="Voters|577x499">
upload: is not a legal scheme for use in a URI. Discourse is parsing it and substituting the long version as above.
Maybe in exchange for an annual monetary tribute, CES would be willing to keep the original site up.
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RE: For the Language Geeks
@Toby-Pereira said in STAR-like method ("reverse STAR"?):
Copeland
Which leads down a rabbit-hole all the way back to the middle ages and writings in Latin. https://d-nb.info/1212798317/34 talks about the sources and gives text and translations in PDF, and leads to https://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/htdocs/emeriti/pukelsheim/llull/ , which gives the text and translations as web pages.
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Setup for Simulating in a Browser
I want to put code up that can run in a browser to simulate elections. A peripheral question I am struggling with concerns how from the user's viewpoint to set up the volatile memory of the parameter values.
I say volatile memory, because at this point I am not planning to tackle allowing people to register and log in so they could store values on the server. So I want to allow that you could fill in form widgets to set up the values you want for the parameters of the simulation, and those would be there in front of you, so long as you didn't navigate to another website. I want to make an encoding of the parameter values available as text that you could copy out and paste somewhere else to save.
It should be possible to load the volatile memory with a set of preset values from the server; those would be constant for a given version of the server.
It should be possible to clear out the parameter values and start over.
It should be possible to edit the volatile memory of the parameters.
So, a question I have is of whether to provide a way that the user could access several named slots in the volatile memory, each slot to have a complete assignment of values to parameters. The alternative would be to just have a single slot.
Latest posts made by Jack Waugh
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RE: Two Currencies
@cfrank said in Two Currencies:
I am not a labor economist, sociologist or Marxist/capitalist theorist by any means
Me, neither. Although I do remember that economists call all raw materials "land".
disentangle the labor and capital economies
More the labor and land economies. As an example of capital equipment, consider a machine that can separate the edible part of rice from the husks. It is probably made mostly of steel, using labor, and the steel is in turn made from iron ore and coal and so on, and additional labor. The land and labor components will be reflected in the two-part money price of the machine when it is proposed to be built and put into use, or when it changes hands. How that translates into rents and/or interest, to reflect the value of using it as a durable machine over time, I suppose that a free-ish market constrained to honesty would result in those also having two parts, reflecting the original costs.
class distinction
I wonder how that would arise and maintain itself. Familial heritage would diminish in importance, I think, due to everyone receiving a dole in land currency and labor currency and possibly also receiving housing, medicine, surgery, education, and food through the government, as I said it has the authority to provide benefits in kind in pursuit of public welfare.
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RE: Smith // Score
@lime, but on the other hand, rescaling is not practical, because it would require reexamining the ballots. The people need precinct-summable systems to maintain security against fraud.
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Two Currencies
I wonder about the merits of a monetary system with separate currencies for labor and raw material. This could be used to implement an economic system at an intermediate point between capitalism and socialism. It would use market forces more than say the USSR did, but would change the constraints and boundary conditions surrounding markets in a different way to contemporary capitalism.
There would be two distinct currencies, both established by government fiat, to command resp. labor and raw material.
Maybe the units for labor could be called "pesetas" and the ones for raw material "kroner" ("krone" in singular). Or other names could be used, such as "dinarii" and "marks".
Products and services would typically have prices with a component in each currency. So a hamburger for example might cost you 30 pesetas + 2.5 kroner. If you don't have both components, you can't afford the product.
Workers for the government would be paid a salary in pesetas only.
The peseta portion of all products would be taxed. The revenue from this tax would allow the government to pay for labor in government service. To make this tax progressive, a portion of it could be paid back to citizens at a fixed monthly rate.
The government would own all minerals that are underground. It would set kroner prices on minerals that private enterprises extract from the ground. The enterprises themselves would supply the equipment and labor to do the extraction, and would pay market prices for those, but would still have to pay for the minerals themselves.
The government would own all land. Land could be leased for terms of several years and the government would set the lease rates in kroner. Land used for dwellings could be subsidized. Rates could differ between farming and industrial uses.
Every month, the government would issue a fixed number of kroner to each citizen. Only a human individual can be a citizen.
For certain kinds of pollution, of types not prohibited outright, the government could collect a fee in kroner. However, a better policy if possible would anticipate this pollution cost in pricing the raw material in the first place. If a use is made of material that could have been used in a way that would have polluted, but instead, it is used in a way that avoids the pollution, the government could pay a partial rebate.
Private entities would be free to offer exchanges between the two currencies. They could charge for this service.
Entities could contract with one another for goods, services, payments, other forms of cooperation, similarly to how that works today. However, the government would have the authority to prevent private firms from acquiring too much power over people via monopolies etc. The government could administratively reorganize corporations or even take away their charters, liquidate their assets, and pay the proceeds to the shareholders. These actions would not require a legal defense; they could be done as administrative decisions for purposes of implementing national policies.
Private ownership of factory machinery, etc., would not be forbidden out of hand. Government enterprises, however, could compete by owning machinery as well. Government enterprises could be established by law or administrative action.
At least one chamber of the national legislature would be comprised of women elected by women. This would have full and sole authority over all matters directly relating to the human birth rate. This could include coercive controls and policing. Male human adults (hereinafter "wermen") would have a constitutionally protected right to opine and argue in public about such matters, but would not have a vote for that chamber and that area of concern. Representation in the women's chamber of women who inherit wealth from a history of theft of labor or land would be limited to strictly less than 50%, even if such women make up a higher proportion of the overall population.
At least one other chamber of the national legislature would be elected by the public at large. A given woman or werman would have an equal vote for this, irrespective of sex. This chamber could pass laws not directly related to the human birth rate.
The government would have the authority to identify individuals and track ancestry.
As a matter of law, familial inheritance of wealth could be limited or eliminated.
The government would have the authority to arrange benefits in kind for people for purposes of general welfare. It could use both kinds of currency to command these benefits.
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RE: STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters
So if I gave A a 5 and B a 3, and you gave B a 5 and A a zero, and A and B made it to the runoff, your and my scorings of them would remain unadjusted?
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RE: Smith // Score
@lime, that's an interesting point. I think it makes good sense to rescale.
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RE: The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Governments have a great deal of power and money; we need to put the voters in charge even if it is expensive.
Agreeing in spades. Thank you for your activism.
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RE: The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
voters could approve all the candidates they like with no concern for strategy or temptation to tactical vote.
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Smith // Score
Has anyone reduced the explanation of how to tally Smith // Score to JavaScript or detailed pseudocode?
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RE: The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
But now, I see that PAV is hard to calculate. So, I don't know. I'm just suggesting that rather than top-four or top-five, maybe some calculation can be used so as to reduce the number of likely clones that make it through. Of course, one candidate from each clone family should be permitted, with sufficient support.