Voters.Army – My New Attempt to make Election Reform Sexy
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You might recall that I created an election reform website, VotersTakeCharges in 2024. It did not fare so well. In the spring of 2025, I tried Voters.News, not much better.
Recently, I combined election reform, including campaign finance reform (the Montana Plan to eliminate corporate election spending), with economic reforms at Voters.Army. This is more popular.I am advocating for BTR-Score for single-winner elections, but I need some help with a few questions:
Who invented BTR-Score, and how can I contact this person?
Would BTR-Score be a good way to choose four candidates in a blanket primary?If so, would the BTR tournament need to be run four times (removing the winner each time)?
A proportional method might be fairer, but I place a high value on simplicity, and I see a need for a diverse set of winners to advance to the general election. I am trying to provide an alternative to Top 4 primaries. A Top 4 ballot initiative lost in Colorado in November 2024.
Thank you, Greg Wasleski
Why I advocate for BTR-Score
One big reason: in August, the Denver City Council came one vote short of sending Ranked Choice Voting to the voters for City Council elections (6 votes for, 7 against). I think that BTR-Score is at least one vote better than RCV.
My Criteria for Single Winner Voting Methods:
Fairness
Reliability
No Favorite Betrayal
Compliance with state constitutions that require election winners to have the highest, greatest, largest number of votes, or a plurality of the votes.
High Voter Expression
Simplicity, Easy to Explain
Sizzle, Easy to SellBTR-Score is easy to explain, and the voters’ ability to rate all candidates gives it plenty of sizzle. After a quick BTR-Score explanation, you can add history and prestige with a sentence or two about Ramon Llull and the Marquis de Condorcet.
Of all the voting system criteria, Condorcet speaks most directly to fairness and reliability. A candidate who beats all other candidates one on one should win. If a “beat all” candidate loses, people will bitch, and rightfully so. In elections with no “beats all” winner, BTR-Score will elect a deserving winner, the winner of the runoff tournament, in a fair and transparent manner.
Yes, as a hybrid model, BTR-Score will fail more than a few important criteria; however, I believe it will be fair and reliable. High voter expression, simplicity, sizzle, and no favorite betrayal are critical to the adoption of a new voting method in the United States.
Concerning Utility and Majority:
Assuming a three-way cycle, the top seed of the BTR tournament will have a 50% chance of winning. The other two candidates have a 25% chance of winning as they must face each other to have a shot at the top seed. This gives the highest utility candidate an advantage, but each contest in the tournament is a two-candidate plurality vote (a majority vote if you ignore the ballots that rate the two candidates equally).Ranked Choice Voting eliminates ties on the ballots, but it is not a true majority system because some of the ballots may be spent before the winner is determined, and the capricious way that some second-choice votes are counted and some are not.
I do not consider a plurality election with a top two runoff to be a true majority election because there are two separate sets of voters voting on separate days. Also, I do not believe in Santa Claus, although he did finish sixth in the first round of the infamous 2022 Alaskan Congressional special election (top four primary with an RCV final). BTW The winner, Mary Peltola, is running for the US Senate. It could be an extremely important race.
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@gregw BTR/score (or BTR/approval) is an excellent system, although it is not stable ex ante under majority preference—only a maximal lottery is. Maximal lotteries also satisfy participation and Condorcet (they can do that because they are inherently non-deterministic in the case of Condorcet cycles—those properties are incompatible for deterministic methods).
BTR was invented by Nicolaus Tideman. He is still around, I don’t know how accessible he is but he is certainly involved in voting theory. Sorting/tie-breaking by score or approval in BTR is an obvious extension.
For primaries, a specified multi-winner method is needed, which could be a “natural” extension of a single-winner method. Peeling winners of BTR off recursively is one option, although it would be more stable to prioritize candidates in the Smith/bipartisan set (the naive recursion can lead to results that violate multi-winner Smith compliance). A PR/multi-winner method would probably be theoretically preferable, maybe some others more versed in multi-winner methods can comment on options for simplicity.
Something on my mind, for any Condorcet method, even a maximal lottery, being intrinsically stable under majority preference after a winner is chosen is simply impossible with Condorcet cycles. My thinking lately is, this implies that stability requires a supplementary mechanism that compensates dissatisfied majorities in the event of Condorcet cycles, specifically to the extent that majority grievances are sufficiently reduced. However, I don’t know what that mechanism ought to be or how it ought to be enforced, and serious consideration of that enters the interface between technical voting theory, real politics, and law. I mused about that here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/591/maximal-lotteries/8
Just food for thought. I’m glad your reform efforts are picking up steam!
P.S.: While I do like Condorcet methods, my opinion is that realistic and highly impactful reforms would be easiest to implement by pushing for approval voting. We discussed that point here as well and it seems to have broad agreement, but obviously that’s just my personal interpretation and some disagree for their own reasons: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/495/approval-voting-as-a-workable-compromise/20?_=1768708850097
