https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaNews/2026-January

The prose in the ElectoramaNews is pretty much all mine, but the code I've "written" to provide the summaries of each of the forums (like my summary of this forum) was mostly generated from a vibecoded script I run periodically. My hope is that I'll be able to provide a more-and-more sophisticated summary of the various forums every month, and maybe I can have my tools call the LLMs to provide the summaries of the discussions. Right now, the "summary" in many sections is basically just a link to every forum post or email or whatever.

Hopefully, by regularly publishing ElectoramaNews, we'll be able to drive some traffic over here to the Voting Theory forum.

Basically, you give a score to all the candidates standing locally, and can also give a separate score to any parties or independent candidates standing in the wider region.

The local candidate with the highest score (or STAR winner or whatever) is elected. Then the local areas are combined into one larger region for the top-up phase, A voter's party scores are given to all candidates standing for that party outside their local area. The rest of the seats are allocated in the most proportional way possible given those already elected. Probably using something like Phragmén.

Works with approval voting too.

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.

This could provide space for people to really theorize and make connections about collective decision making in general, whether that's in institutional, government or informal settings.

Actually it could be nice to have a "beyond categories" space too, similar to the watercooler but more geared as a catch all for voting/collective decision making discussion that's multidisciplinary or defies categories.

Cliff's Notes:

Here's to a great next era of the Voting Theory Forum!

To everyone who RSVPed, attended, volunteered, gave input, or stepped up to serve in a leadership position. Thank you!!!

In the context of this forum, maybe it could make sense to keep the most "general" categories and move everything else to tags? People would still need to agree on what counts as general though.

Some issues with tags though: they have a length limit, and the interface for browsing them and adding them isn't as organized or alluring (colorful) as the category browser.

I'll keep you looped in if there's anything on the tech team that comes up.

Notes remind me that the distro I used on Linode (now merged with Akamai) is Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (bionic).

Directly into root: only Jack. But see "sys" below. Also, note that whoever can log in to the Linode console as a user belonging to the account under which Linode provides the VM, can obtain root access.

theory (used for production): Jack, "theory@li629-205" pseudouser used for alleged backups, "ewilhelm@broq" Eric Wilhelm.

stage (conceivably usable for staging): same people as "theory".

sys (used for system administration): same people as "theory". This account has my version of "sudo". So, whoever can SSH to this account can do Superuser things. My version never asks for a password.

share (used to provide software for both "theory" and "stage"): same people as "theory".

At the last meeting we discussed funds and bookkeeping and managing of that kind of thing and decided to do that through Equal Vote so we don't need a whole separate person/process for treasury and bookkeeping. They also voted to coalition unanimously (I abstained.)

The other reason mentioned was the "What if I get hit by a bus" issue, so we have been in the process of moving the forum into the fold of Equal Vote assets to ensure that passing of keys can be ensured, and adjudicated if needed, should anything happen to whoever has it in their name currently.

As part of that I've put in a bunch of hours over the last month on the back end and we now have the url on our the Equal Vote account and are paying for it from Equal Vote. Donations for the Forum can also be made to Equal Vote with earmarking for the Forum if desired. We also obtained a grant from Azure that can pay for the hosting, so the plan is to move the hosting there.

Again, Voting Theory Forum is still fully autonomous and this is a service that Equal Vote can offer and is happy to provide since we already manage this stuff for a number of other sites in our network.

I don't want to do anything that requires a different log in or cookie or whatever, I'd like to know where the votes are coming from, and discourage people from voting more than once or voting if they don't even introduce themselves or participate in the community otherwise. So I'd prefer just collect the ballots manually for now, from posts and signatures here, and maybe posts on reddit's EndFPTP forum. There's also the election methods mailing list....

Remember that we can do a new one at any time, and anyone in the group can post one. I'll happily tabulate them and show pretty results and share my work on a forkable codepen , at least to get people started. Anyone is free to retabulate.

I was hoping to collect high-resolution cardinal ballots. I'd suggest rate on a scale of 0-10, decimal places allowed e.g. 5.76. If anyone wants to use a different scale, such as 0 to a million, fine, whatever...it will just be normalized anyway. And then we'll show results in a bunch of different methods. People can supply an approval threshold, if none supplied it defaults to 5. So mine might look like:

(that's using what is in my signature, but some of the groupings don't make sense for a real poll, especially "any condorcet")

I'll show some ideas for the pretty results display (hopefully with some interactivity or ability to animate or whatnot) soon. You may have seen some of my work in this direction....here's a some of it: (the Sankey diagram for IRV in the upper left isn't mine but it is uses an open source library to generate them)screenvoting.png

@rob said in An idea to increase activity at this forum:

That said, in the perfect world, yes there would be a nice voting widget.

I'm gradually working toward that. I have experimented with running custom js in this forum and looking for things in posts that I can parse and replace and add interactivity. . (@Jack-Waugh has been trusting enough to allow me privileges so I can do that.... but currently nothing is running) Automatic server-side tabulation and external storage of poll data would come later if people stay interested. It's doable, but not needed to get it started.

Do you know javascript or typescript? 🙂

If anyone is willing and able to back me up in supporting the server, please send me your public key that you use with SSH. If you tend to use PUTTY, please research how to convert your public key for use on Linux. Please take care not to send your private key.