My argument above has been demolished on Facebook. Maybe a similar argument could be made with a different example, but I now see that with the example I gave, the Alternative Vote (IRV) gives the same electoral outcome as an evaluative system would.

You should probably contact the admins directly about this. Their email is at the bottom of the home page.

To my understanding, women can vote under just the same conditions as wermen can, in every State, and no one is proposing undoing that.

Rob is such an underhanded person. He knows for a fact that Arrow's Theorem only applies to ranking systems.

Anyway, yes there is this strategy but it is rare that the polling is clear enough that it works. People tend to say that IRV is such a bad system that it evades the ability to game it. Since it is polarizing, nonmonotonic and majoritarian the effects are hard to predict. This means that trying to strategize is hard. It is sort of like saying having a car which is falling apart will prevent you from speeding. It makes it more risky sure but that is not a good motivation to not have something better.

In the end, it is really STAR which everybody should get behind.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that people can't be convinced that Approval is expressive enough. I think it probably is, but it's extremely hard to get across. And I am not 100% sure that Approval is really as expressive as I have been arguing that it is. Maybe there is a hole in the argument that I have been advancing. So I'm thinking we should advocate for Score with finer granularity in the single-winner cases, unless the local activists argue that it's just a nonstarter logistically. How about using a range with seven values? I suspect that spacing them according to a logistic function would work best strategically, but that's impossible to explain to people, so how about seven values equally spaced then?

@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.

Reminder -- these happen every Tuesday.

@jack-waugh said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

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 think you are right, and therefore is something we should be especially careful about. We shouldn't ever appear to take sides here. Example: when I got frustrated with this community's slow progress (and seemingly conflicting agendas), I posted a bunch of photos of violence on January 6th, showing what happens when people are so polarized that many of them can't accept an outcome they don't like.

But to be clear: I am not blaming this on the right. (well, not here, in this forum) I am blaming it on choose-one voting. If someone looks at those 1/6 photos and sees a bunch of patriots fighting for a noble cause.... fine. They can also be angry at choose-one voting.

So it is a bit of a vicious cycle here. Broken voting causes polarization, polarization prevents us from fixing voting.

@jack-waugh Well the whole issue with president is complicated by the electoral college, so for such hypotheticals such as this, it's probably easier to imagine some system that doesn't include the electoral college. Adapting a better voting method to presidential elections is a complex topic of its own.

But the point is, under a better election system, middle ground candidates would be more likely to run and to be elected. Political figures today that are closer to the middle include Democrats like Sinema and Manchin, and Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney. John McCain was fairly in the middle (but Palin wasn't, of course). Perot was in the middle in that he appealed almost equally to both sides. Arnold Schwarzenegger is centrist by national standards, but was on the right relative to California.

None of these are centrist on all things, of course. Cheney is very conservative on most policies, she just doesn't toe the Republican line on things related to rejecting election outcomes and other things specific to the changes in the Republican party in the last few years. And none are really great examples because they are operating in a system that is biased against centrists, so they have a lot of hate directed at them (more from their own party than the opposite party).

As for Biden, that's a bit tricky. He's actually considered quite moderate. I suspect most of the hate directed at him from the right is because the country had gotten highly polarized in the few years prior.

@sarawolk said in Reddit: Reconsidering the r/EndFPTP Rules:

I agree with you that some well done moderation there would have likely kept @Andy-Dienes and others more engaged and made them feel more respected.

Well if you read the thread you'll see there was moderation, by me. I jumped in and smoothed things out. When I called rbj out for being aggressive and told him why it's not ok, he said "Yes. You are exactly correct, @rob."

I've been doing a fair amount of that here, even though I am not in any official sense a moderator. I've had admin power for some time, and here and there use it to deal with spammers and such. But mostly, I just jumping in as a regular user when someone goes out of line and trying to bring it back.

In the course of the thread above (which you really should read if you want to know how I handle moderation here), rb-j "doxxed" Andy by posting screenshots showing proof that Andy had used some particular identity at Reddit that he doesn't use now. Or something like that. Doxxing. I dealt with that like this:
Screenshot 2023-03-28 180710.jpg

I thought that was moderated about as well as it could have been, although I probably would have DM'd rbj right off the bat if I felt like I was an official moderator. RBJ is very cantankerous (he's always getting banned at EndFPTP and other places and seems proud of it), but he is also really smart and makes good contributions on the legislative side.

I'm curious how you think moderation should be done. Clear rules are nice to have, but there are always gray areas. More importantly, you need someone with good judgement to enforce them in a way that doesn't unnecessarily drive people away. Would you disagree with any of that?

@psephomancy "Most representative" is good. I also use "best represents the will of the people". The "center of public opinion" works.

"Centrist" and "moderate" are definitely to be avoided because they are loaded, turn people off who don't identify that way, and imply that the system has a centrist bias or center expansion effect.

@jack-waugh You can also draw parallels to referendums or judge elections where you can vote for or against each item, or abstain.

@toby-pereira a historical re-enactment in the style of this video is to have one of the kids tying his shoelaces together with another’s or something, and then the third winning because the other two fell over 😂 Also, the ridiculous irony of using a race like that to demonstrate their argument is: the winner of the race IS the Condorcet winner!

In fact, I think using a race analogy is a great way to convince people that the Condorcet winner is at least worth consideration when it exists. And a Condorcet cycle could be shown with runners chasing each other in a circle rather than proceeding toward the finish line.