<![CDATA[Advocacy Tailored to Location]]>I'm suggesting this strategy for changing the laws around single-winner elections:

for a given locality, if they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, then promote Score{1, .99, .01, 0} else promote Approval.

]]>http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/90/advocacy-tailored-to-locationRSS for NodeSat, 05 Sep 2026 15:09:51 GMTMon, 14 Jun 2021 12:42:13 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to Advocacy Tailored to Location on Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:27:52 GMT]]>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?

]]>http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/429http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/429Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:27:52 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Advocacy Tailored to Location on Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:22:31 GMT]]>@NevinBR, where I said "they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV", I should have said "they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, but have repealed IRV."

]]>http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/428http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/428Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:22:31 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Advocacy Tailored to Location on Tue, 15 Jun 2021 19:42:42 GMT]]>@Jack-Waugh said in Advocacy Tailored to Location:

for a given locality, if they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, then promote Score{1, .99, .01, 0} else promote Approval.

Without detracting from your goals here, I think it is worth considering a much smaller incremental change for places that already have IRV, which nonetheless solves significant problems and improves outcomes of elections.

The IRV halting condition is: “If one of the remaining candidates has more than half of the remaining votes, they win.”

That could be modified to: “If one of the remaining candidates would defeat all of the others head-to-head, they win.”

This small change turns IRV into not only a Condorcet method, but in fact a Smith method. The winner is guaranteed to be in the topologically highest strongly-connected-component of the pairwise results graph.

From an advocacy and education perspective, I suggest using the term “clear winner” in place of “Condorcet winner”. Then the new halting condition can be expressed succinctly as, “If one of the remaining candidates is a clear winner, they win.”

This phrasing also makes it easier to explain the problem being solved: the standard IRV method can fail to elect a clear winner. With this change to the halting condition, we can guarantee that won’t happen.

]]>http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/422http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/422Tue, 15 Jun 2021 19:42:42 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Advocacy Tailored to Location on Mon, 14 Jun 2021 12:48:08 GMT]]>For non-equally-spaced Score schemes, I'm suggesting the following system of letter grades:

  • A = 1
  • B = .99
  • C = .9
  • D = .5
  • E = .1
  • F = .01
  • G = 0

A system omitting C, D, and E would use letter grades ABFG. The middle letters would be reserved for possible expansion of the system for if people complained that it had insufficiently fine granularity.

]]>http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/421http://www.votingtheory.org/forum/post/421Mon, 14 Jun 2021 12:48:08 GMT