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I've seen weighted seats proposed before. It is a fairly intuitive idea, so nothing new. But my instinct is that I don't think it's such a good idea. I think there is something to be said for a parliament made up of people with equal power.

Would the weighting purely count towards their voting power in the elected body, or does it have other effects such as more time to speak?

I think one problem is that it there might be a "celebrity" effect. If multiple candidates are standing for one party, the best well known one is likely to take most of the power available to that party without necessarily being "better".

Also while it's based on votes, voters don't get a say in this weighting. I might prefer candidate A to B (from the same party, or having similar ideals) by a small amount but might still prefer them to have equal power in parliament rather than having all the power directed to A. So I'd have to weigh up what I think other people will vote for and then vote in the opposite direction to balance it out.

If democracy was working properly in the first place, there should be enough candidates out there to represent your views without having pin everything on potentially just one candidate - a single point of failure.

@cfrank said in Idea for truly proportional representation:

@Toby-Pereira I wonder what you think about this, since you have deeper knowledge of PR systems.

Just to let you know I've seen this, but I'll get back to you in the next few days. For some reason I'm not getting much time to post on here at the moment!

@A Former User said in Kennedy Jr’s Candidacy as a Route to Voting Reform:

This thread made me lose interest in this forum. RFK Jr. is a monster.

Just one person posting something you disagree with made you lose interest in the whole forum?

There is an online obituary if you want to read it here.

@cfrank While I'm not an expert in how to make methods pass particular criteria, participation seems to be a very hard one to get. Most of the methods that pass it seem to be simple adding up ones (e.g. FPTP, Borda, approval, score), although Descending Solid Coalitions and Descending Acquiescing Coalitions are slightly weird methods that do pass it apparently.

@cfrank said in Fixing Participation Failure in “Approval vs B2R”:

(6) Run a secondary, independent head-to-head election between the B2R winner and their adversary, with the following caveats:
--> Voters are not tied down in any way to their original preference between the B2R winner and the adversary, and can freely vote for either in the independent head-to-head. Also, voters who did not participate in the first round are fully allowed to participate in the final round. By default, voters' original ballots will be used to determine the preference, but voters may opt in to swap their rating either 0 or 1 times, whichever amount is necessary to indicate an advantage that they wish to disclose.
--> However, based on these swaps, we can count the net number of swaps that are advantageous to the adversary over the B2R winner compared with the original ballots. If this number is positive, the election proceeds as you would expect, with ties broken by the sort order. However, if the number is not positive, if the original head-to-head was in favor of the B2R survivor, and if a material difference would be incurred, then the adversary will be conferred an automatic +1 head-to-head advantage, and will also automatically win ties.

I find this part a bit hard to understand.

Also, if it's an independent head-to-head, do you mean a separate trip to the polling station, or just a separate part of the ballot paper? If it's a separate trip, then it would be impossible to manage the swaps and each voter's default position without losing anonymity.

@kodos I've changed it so new users have to register with an e-mail address. I don't think that's too onerous, and it should make the problem go away.

@kodos I'll have a look to see if I can find a way to change that or if it's "hardwired" in.

If you're pitting the winners of two methods against each other, what do you do if it's the same candidate? Are they just the winner, or does there need to be a final head-to-head between two candidates?

@kodos I also have admin powers but wasn't aware this was a thing either. But I've just looked at the user list in the admin section and it seems that you have no e-mail address by your name. That could be the problem. It might be worth trying to add an e-mail address to your account. I think you'll then need to verify it by clicking on a link that gets e-mailed to you or something.