If you are interested in stepping up and helping with forum leadership we are currently seeking volunteers to help out in a variety of roles including:

Council and Leadership. Come to meetings or apply to join the council. Help us stay true to our vision navigate any challenges that emerge as we grow into the forum that this movement needs us to be.

Tech Team. Volunteer on the tech team. The forum is based on NodeBB which is written in JavaScript using Node.js. We chose this technology platform with an eye toward extensibility so that this forum could integrate with voting tools including those created by members.

Moderators. Apply to be a moderator. Perhaps the most important role is to become a moderator for forum discussions so that the vibrant exchange of ideas on the forum is welcoming and respectful.

If you are interested in any of the volunteer opportunities above, please contact us at forum@equal.vote and put in your availability here. We would love to have you join us at our next Council meeting.

Here’s me: God did not come down and say, “here’s the rule book for democracy: vote every 4 years, electoral college, tricameral system, yadda yadda.” Making up rules to voting is putting the cart in front of the horse. The only thing that matters is that we all have equalness and this be converted into law. [see “Golden Rule’” any religion] So, there you are. A person, at her core, is a binary vote, 247, from cradle to grave. A leader, Oprah or Trump or You lasts if most of the people are happy (vote thumbs up). I have taken apart our decrepit antique engine of democracy, cleaned it down to its core and rebuilt it with only what is absolutely necessary so that it works as best as possible forever: Democracy.

Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Saving the World!

p.s. “Clean” law the foundation for saving the world. The cleaner the better. Real law starts with god (the equalness of all people) and is enacted by a specific and immediately accountable human proxy (a disposable leader).

I'm better at programming and operating computers than I am introductions. I've been doing Linux admin, Perl, web and backend database stuff for a couple decades now. I'm available to help with tech here, but I'm generally pretty busy lately.

Thanks,
Eric

My goal is voting system(s) that are user-friendly and voter-motivating, and yet as secure, reliable, and expressive as possible. Achieving these objectives is a tough challenge, but failing them is often why way too many people are frustrated and untrusting of how we elect decision-makers and resultingly, their decisions and leadership. Politics throughout the world, frankly is getting worse rather than better, so expeditiously developing worthy voting system answers, and then convincing decision-makers to adopt them, is a indeed a high calling.

I am glad to help moderate this forum so that as a forum we are productive, effective, and stay on-track.

Welcome. Glad you come in peace. Peace is good, so don't be stirring the shit. 🙂

Kidding. Precinct summability has some practical value I suppose, but other things are far more important. I'm not all that into PR but others obviously are. (I tend to think that improving single winner methods is a lower hanging fruit, at least in the US)

My big emphasis is "voting on voting methods" (eat our own dogfood, create consensus, etc) and creating useful Codepens for tabulating and visualizing. So if you know javascript, then double-welcome!

I made a post about SMDPR a few days back. It is here

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/159/smdpr

We need politicians to work in cooperation in groups, because the other option is dictatorship.

I don't see how you arrive at that.

Unless you consider groups to include things like "the Senate," any a particular Congressional committee, or some sort of special interest group that concentrates on a single issue (e.g. the Sierra Club). But those aren't parties. Parties tend to encompass everything, that is, a politician is a member of one party to the exclusion of other parties. That makes everything tribal, as well as correlating things that aren't necessarily correlated in every voters' mind. (for instance, say I am anti-abortion but pro-gun control)

I like the idea that both voters and candidates can consider each issue independently. Parties tend to force them together.

The problem in the US (and in many jurisdictions) is that the elections system freezes out all but two estalished parties.

Sure. Duverger's law. That's because of plurality voting, which I think most of us consider "the enemy."

A recent election for mayor of San Francisco (where I live) had 8 candidates, none of which were affiliated with a party. This worked because there was a ranked choice election. (IRV is not perfect, but it sure is better than plurality).

Some of the candidates "teamed up", advertising together and such. (saying things like "whichever of us you put first, put the other one second") Various special interest groups endorsed one or more candidates, but the candidates weren't "members" of any group, at least not to the exclusion of other groups.

How is that dictatorship? Even if it is for a parliamentary type election (Senate, Congress, board of Supervisors, etc), I don't see how parties are needed or benefit anyone if the election method is resistant to vote splitting.

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I know you think about candidates in absolute terms while I think relatively.

Not sure what you mean by thinking of candidates in absolute terms. I have always been emphatic that voters should score RELATIVE to the others on the ballot.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm not sure I understand your question (or what that has to do with it eliminating the negative effects of vote splitting, which to me is a completely different issue than how you resolve one particular scenario).

Proof by counter example is a perfectly rigorous method for mathematical proof. I pointed out a scenario where negative voting could not encode enough expression to resolve both vote splitting instances on the ballot. You reply by stating that Approval Voting (which I did not mention) will not encode all the information needed to resolve an issue unrelated to vote splitting.

@rob said in Hello:

The strategy is very similar to strategy in FPTP, but you've got more options.

Agreed. Vote splitting still exists but it is better than plurality voting.

@rob said in Hello:

I think it is common for voters to only have a strong opinion about a single candidate

This is what I was doubting in the last email. I would need some real evidence before I endorsed a system that baked that assumption into it.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm highly skeptical that various studies (that by necessity seek to answer very generalized questions) prove anything one way or the other, but I don't really care to debate that at this point.

I agree that it is hard to get a definitive answer. In the absense of a knowing I would stay away from restricting the expression of voters. This comes with a trade off in complexity where the spectrum is something like

plurality - Negative voting -IRV - Approval - Score - STAR

You need to be to the right of IRV to not have vote splitting and that is what I think is the most important.

I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems".

I have found that everybody ends up there eventually