@jack-waugh

Correct. It just falls back to regular IRV in the case of a cycle. And yes, cycles are expected to be very rare.

It isn't what I'd consider the best Condorcet method, but I think that is probably outweighed by the practical / strategic value of making it seem similar to a method that is already being used and otherwise has some momentum. I think it would be very easy to sell as simply being a variation of Ranked Choice.

I think if any municipality were to adopt it, it would then make it a lot easier to propose to the next municipality moving to RCV some sort of better Condorcet method. But really, I don't care, Bentham is fine as far as I'm concerned. I believe, in real world elections, it would be as immune to strategic voting and strategic nomination as any method.

That's the same idea the German NGO Mehr Demokratie proposes. I proposed a similar modification to MMP that uses approval voting for the direct mandate and multi party choice. The party vote is distributed equally among all approved parties, then all parties that don't reach the threshold are excluded and the vote is distributed equally among the remaining parties.
It has the same effect as a second choice, but with the added benefit that voters don't have to limit their vote to one party.

@mosbrooker said in Me again...:

laws that censor dangerous people (Ron DeSantis) from harming people (the entire LGBTQ community).

I'm on your side (....?), but still I think this is more political than I recommend for this group. Not everyone agrees on whether the person you mention is harmful. He's currently a fairly likely to win (25% or so, according to prediction markets) the us presidential election.

And I'm not necessarily on your side in terms of thinking we should "censor" such people.... censure, maybe.

Democracy can actually put divisive figures into power if it is to "run its course", unless that democracy is specifically designed to not do so. That's why I stay interested in this topic, the ability to shape the democracy so it actually works. There is no one best way, but some are certainly better than others. Some systems, such as the "first past the post"/"plurality" one that is so common in the US, actually drive people apart. Unfortunately, a lot of people think the word democracy means plurality. (although they often mislabel it "majority")

But it does seem rather weird to say "let democracy run its course", while also saying "we need laws that censor dangerous people". Who is going to put those laws in place? Elected people? But clearly our democracy will elect people who don't agree with your idea of what a dangerous person is (while claiming that all kinds of things that you probably support are dangerous)

@mosbrooker said in Voting Theory sooo boring if not for the key to everything!:

All roads pointed to law, the rule book of society. All laws pointed to the US Constitution. I have no interest in other nation’s laws because we are, by very far, closest to the people rule the law not vice-versa.

Are you sure about that? I don't think the US is generally seen internationally as a shining beacon in terms of democracy.

I started to game theory this whole business. Start with an island (so no outside influence or interference) and One Leader. When does the OL face an opponent?
…this is about where I start to fall asleep. I’ve written this so many times it’s killing me. SOOO tired

Fast forward…
The OL (me because who else is going to get this ball rolling if not the discoverer of Democracy?) is subject to immediate removal upon the simultaneous dissent of over half of all people. I choose my opponent, Lisa of course.

I think we discussed your leadership model before and getting to choose your opponent was a bit of a sticking point for me.

Now that we are living in harmony and budgeting our resources, what’s the end plan? No way are we going to fly a spaceship to a near (1000 light years away) planet to set up shop. Not gonna happen. Get used to it. When we are done with Earth, we are done as a species. Been a good run.

BUT we must help life get a footing elsewhere. We can load bits of life (amoebas, cells etc.) abord a flying freezer and hurtle it off to other galaxies. Whether we aim for a planet in or throw a dart at a massive galaxy, our offering might just spark life somewhere else. Maybe, just maybe, life will take hold, and, in 20 million short years, people will be picking up dry cleaning and are back to leaving bad yelp reviews. From there, the planet will begin to succumb to the mismanagement of its resources, a person will design a blueprint specifying a system so that people can live with each other in peaceful and fun harmony until their last day upon which a spaceship carrying life’s building blocks is launched…

This is getting a bit off-topic now, but you think there's no chance of getting intelligent life away from Earth without evolving again from scratch? What about uploading minds and beaming the information across the universe?

Adam helped me get in contact Jeanne who sent over the whole ballot data. I have it here in case anyone is interested
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18rBTSqzOAoGK4ZTsaFy5LfU-IiMbYBpkgkUE6vqz8mA/edit?usp=sharing
Jeanne said to credit David McCune with the original work of processing the raw cvr ballots

I vote red.

@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.

As said, voters can often face a dilemma of whether to approve someone or not. What counts as approval etc. If I approve my second favourite candidate, what if it turns out my favourite could have won after all?

Also under ranked voting, ranks have less of an obvious meaning so a voter doesn't have to feel they are explicitly endorsing a candidate when they rank them over someone else. Say my preference order is A>B>C and B and C are the frontrunners, but I hate both B and C while preferring B to C. I might happily rank A>B>C. But to explicitly approve B might be a step too far, even though it's the strategically optimal vote for me.

Also, it really invites people to say that it violates one person, one vote, and you have to explain why it doesn't.

I've said previously on this group that non-deterministic elections can be a good way to simplify proportional representation. It doesn't have to be as crude as simple random ballot where you have one representative per constituency selected by the drawing of a single ballot. As I said here just earlier this month:

Proportional methods tend to just be more complex by their nature. But if you allow them to be non-deterministic then that goes away. E.g. COWPEA Lottery which uses approval ballots. Or if you have a region that elects, say, 6 candidates, voters just rank their top 6 candidates. Then you consecutively pick six ballots at random and elect the unelected candidate that is highest ranked on that ballot.

This type of method, while it doesn't guarantee a very proportional result in each region, would actually give better proportionality nationally than deterministic methods that use these smallish regions (like STV), and they also keep the election candidate-based, which other nationally proportional methods tend not to.

Random ballot with just one representative per region guarantees that honest voting is the best strategy, but I tend to think that it becomes too lotteristic at that point. With e.g. five or six chances to be elected (as in the above methods), particularly popular candidates would not be on such a knife-edge of being elected.

I also think that non-deterministic methods send out a good message - that there are no "safe seats", and that representing the electorate is a privilege and not some guaranteed right.

So while non-deterministic methods might be a tough sell, I personally prefer them for national parliaments.

I understand. Will do.

@wolftune Oh I see, the link is just from someone's website not something you wrote up. Got it, sorry.

I guess where I had seen the description of a "simplified variant" was on the ElectoWiki site, at the bottom of the page. https://electowiki.org/wiki/Bottom-Two-Runoff_IRV

Simplified Variant
If you remove the redistribution step, leaving the candidates in the initial 1st choice sort order for the entire process, BTR-IRV becomes precinct summable. Vote counting only requires the 1st choice vote counts and the pairwise preference matrix from each precinct, not the complete ranking counts.

I think it's an interesting difference. Using your paper ballot example, this would mean putting the ballots into piles based on first choices only, and never redistributing them for the purposes of selecting the bottom two candidates in any round. This is what I understood from that write-up that is linked, as it does not mention any redistribution. It's "simpler" in the sense that you can skip the redistribution process at each step. It is also "simpler" in the compilation complexity sense, that it is precinct summable.

It raises an interesting question- if someone were to go to an IRV advocate and pitch them on a tweak, which variant to propose? BTR-IRV with distribution is closer to traditional IRV, so perhaps that is a reason to propose it, as it is more similar to traditional IRV. But on the other hand, BTR-IRV without distribution is simpler in some ways, which can be viewed as a virtue as well.

It's also worth thinking about how much the distinction matters in practice. Curious if anyone has thoughts on that.