I think there are many of us here who prefer some voting system or another over approval voting. I also think there is room for improvement. However, approval voting has a huge advantage in its simplicity and potential for integration into existing infrastructure. This is totally besides the comparisons to make in terms of game theoretical stability with Condorcet methods and expressivity with Score or others.

My thought is that, if we are really going to make progress by consolidating our support behind a single voting system, then realistically, Approval voting fits the bill. That isn’t to say that it should be the final destination for voting reform, but it would absolutely be a major step forward. While IRV is something of a tokenism, Approval would be an actual game changer.

Any thoughts about this are welcome.

This is a minor attempt to modify Condorcet methods in a simple way to become more responsive to broader consensus and supermajority power. It’s sort of like the reverse of STAR and may already be a system that I don’t know the name of. In my opinion, the majority criterion is not necessarily a good thing in itself, since it enables tyrannical majorities to force highly divisive candidates to win elections, which is why I’ve been trying pretty actively to find some way to escape it.

For the moment I will assume that a Condorcet winner exists in every relevant case, and otherwise defer the replacement to another system.

First, find the Condorcet winner, which will be called the “primary” Condorcet winner. Next, find the “secondary” Condorcet winner, which is the Condorcet winner from the same ballots where the primary Condorcet winner is removed everywhere.

Define the Borda difference from B to A on a ballot as the signed difference in their ranks. For example, the Borda difference from B to A on the ballot A>B>C>D is +1, and on C>B>D>A is -2.

If A and B are the primary and secondary Condorcet winners, respectively, then we tally all of the Borda differences from B to A. If the difference is positive (or above some threshold), then A wins, and if it is negative or zero (or not above the threshold), then B wins.

For example, consider the following election:

A>B>C>D [30%]
A>B>D>C [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

In this case, A is a highly divisive majoritarian candidate and is the primary Condorcet winner. B is easily seen to be the secondary Condorcet winner. The net Borda difference from B to A is

(0.3+0.21)-2(0.4+0.09)<0

Therefore B would be chosen as the winner in this case.

Some notes about this method:
It certainly does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion, nor does it satisfy the majority criterion. These are both necessarily sacrificed in an attempt to prevent highly divisive candidates from winning the election. It does reduce to majority rule in the case of two candidates, and it does satisfy the Condorcet loser criterion, as well as monotonicity and is clearly polynomial time. It can also be modified to use some other metric in the runoff based on the ballot-wise Borda differences.

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Continuing with the above example, suppose that the divisive majority attempts to bury B, which is the top competitor to A.
This will change the ballots to something like

A>C>D>B [30%]
A>D>C>B [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

And if the described mechanism is used in this case, we will find instead that C is elected. So burial has backfired if B is "honestly" preferred over C by the divisive majority, and they would have been better off indicating their honest preference and electing B.

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And again, suppose that the divisive majority decides to bury the top two competitors to A, namely B and C, below D, keeping the order of honest preference between them. We will find

A>D>B>C [30%]
A>D>B>C [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

In this case, the secondary Condorcet winner is D, and the mechanism will in fact elect D, again a worse outcome for the tactical voters.

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Finally, suppose that they swap the order of honest preference and vote as

A>D>C>B [30%]
A>D>C>B [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

Still this elects D.

As a general description, this method will elect the Condorcet winner unless they are too divisive, in which case it will elect the secondary Condorcet winner, which will necessarily be less divisive. I believe that choosing the runoff to be between the primary and secondary Condorcet winners should maintain much of the stability of Condorcet methods, while the Borda runoff punishes burial and simultaneously addresses highly divisive candidates.

This is a concept I had in mind which may already have been described, although not all of the logistics are necessarily hashed out and there may be issues with it. The idea is described below, but first I want to make a connection to “cake-cutting.” The standard cake-cutting problem is when two greedy agents are going to try to share a cake fairly without an external arbiter. An elegant solution is a simple procedure where one agent is allowed to cut the cake into two pieces, and the other agent is allowed to choose which piece to take for themselves. The first agent will have incentive to cut the cake as evenly as discernible, since the second agent will try to take whichever piece is larger. In the end, neither agent should have any misgivings about their piece of cake.

So this is my attempt to apply that kind of procedure to political parties and representatives. Forgive my lack of education regarding how political parties work:

• There should be a government body that registers political parties and demands the compliance of all political parties to its procedures in order for them to acquire seats for representation;
• (Eyebrow raising, but you might see why...) Every voter must register as a member of exactly one political party in order to cast a ballot (?);
• Each political party A is initially reserved a number of seats in proportion to the number of voters with membership in A; the fraction of seats reserved for A is P(A). however
• For each pair of political parties A and B (where possibly B=A), a fraction of seats totaling P(A~B):=P(A)P(B) will be reserved for candidates nominated by A, and elected by B; these seats will be called ambassador seats from A to B when B is different from A, and otherwise will be called the main platform seats for A;
• Let there be a support quota Q(A~B) for the number of votes needed to elect ambassadors from A to B, and call P(A~B) the ambassador quota of party A for B. If E(A~B) is the fraction of filled A-to-B ambassador seats (as a fraction of all seats), I.e. nominees from A who are actually elected by members of B, then A will only be allowed to elect P(A~A)*min{min{E(A~B)/P(A~B), E(B~A)/P(B~A)}: B not equal to A} of its own nominees. That is, the proportion of reserved main-platform seats that A will be allowed to fill is the least fraction of reserved ambassador seats it fills in relation to every other party, including both the ambassadors from A to other parties, and the ambassadors from other parties to A.

This procedure forces parties to also nominate candidates that compromise between different party platforms in order to obtain seats for any main-platform representatives. If a party fails to meet its quota for interparty compromises, it will lose representation. On the flip side, this set up will also establish high incentives for other parties to compromise with them in order to secure their own main-platform representation. In total, this system would give parties high incentives to compromise with each other and find candidates in the middle ground, which will serve as intermediaries between their main platforms.

Basically, here the outlines indicate seats open to be filled by candidates who are nominated by the corresponding party, and the fill color indicates seats open for election by the corresponding party:

Seats with outlines and fills of non-matching color are ambassador seats, and seats with matching outline and color are main platform seats. In terms of party A, by failing to nominate sufficiently-many candidates who would meet the support quota Q(A~B) to become elected as ambassadors from A to B, or by failing to elect enough ambassadors from B to A, party A restricts its own main platform representation and that of B simultaneously. By symmetry the reciprocal relationship holds from B to A. Therefore all parties are entangled in a dilemma: to secure main-platform representation, parties must nominate a proportional number of candidates who are acceptable enough to other parties to be elected as ambassadors.

To see that all needed seats are filled in the case of a stalemate, where parties refuse to nominate acceptable candidates to other parties and/or refuse to elect ambassadors, the election can be redone with the proportions being recalculated according to the party seats that were actually filled.

The support quotas collectively serve as a non-compensatory threshold to indicate sufficient levels of inter-party compromise. Ordinary PR is identical to PR with ambassador quotas but with all support quotas set to zero, whereby there is no incentive to nominate compromise candidates.

The purpose of this kind of procedure is twofold: firstly, it should significantly enhance the cognitive diversity of representatives, and secondly, it should significantly strengthen more moderate platforms (namely those of the ambassadors) that can serve as intermediaries for compromises between the main platforms of parties. Every party A has a natural “smooth route” from its main platform to the main platform of every other party: The main platform of A should naturally be in communication with ambassadors from A to B, who should naturally communicate with ambassadors from B to A, who should naturally communicate with the main platform of B.

Also, this procedure gives small parties significant bargaining power in securing representation. Large parties will have much more representation to lose than the small parties that are able to secure seats if the small parties refuse to elect any ambassadors, so rationally speaking, large parties should naturally concede to nominating sufficiently many potential ambassadors whose platforms are closer to the main platforms of those small parties. The same rationale holds for the potential ambassadors nominated by small parties, who also should tend to have platforms closer to the main platform of the small party.

Finally, this system creates significant incentives for voters to learn about the platforms of candidates from other parties who stand to reserve seats for representatives.

@lime the point of this post isn’t to argue that approval voting is superior to other methods or that modifications wouldn’t improve approval voting, it’s to point out that despite other methods being potentially superior, standard approval voting is probably the most realistic target for near future steps toward substantially reformed voting.

Unfortunately, more choices does mean the system is more complicated. You can observe that the addition of even a very simple, marginal modification as you suggest already raises questions. Every question about a method is an opportunity for distrust to be exploited, even if the method is ultimately better. Plurality is terrible, but almost nobody had questions about it, and that’s why it’s stuck around for so long. Do you see what I mean? I may be a bit jaded, but I’m hoping to be realistic.

I don’t mean to be a downer, but my point is a bit sad: in terms of what people would prefer, such as more choices or buttons, what we have to deal with is exactly the fact that people are having a hard time getting what they prefer. The political status quo is strongly opposed to voting reform, it will have to relinquish substantial power and accountability to the people under an effective voting system. There’s a reason only flawed tokenisms like IRV have passed through legislature in recent times. In fact, there is a history of voting reforms being enacted and then reversed.

I just learned about this now. It’s a Smith compliant method, and is participation compliant up until necessary randomization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximal_lotteries

Basically, you form the majority margin matrix Mij over candidates. Then consider the two player game where each player chooses one candidate: if player 1 chooses i, and player 2 chooses j, then player 1 gets Mij and player 2 gets -Mij.

This game has at least one mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, which is a distribution over candidates. A maximal lottery selects a candidate at random according to one such mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. In this sense, a maximal lottery is a mixed “candidate” that cannot be challenged by a majority.

Occasionally maximal lotteries are non-unique, but they often are. A trivial case is when a Condorcet winner exists, in which case the maximal lottery selects the Condorcet winner as a pure strategy. Orthogonally, if there is an odd number of voters, and if preferences are strict, the maximal lottery is always unique. Otherwise, symmetries like multiple dominance components in the Smith set can induce degeneracies.

Still, any maximal lottery satisfies probabilistic notions of participation, where participation cannot reduce the chances of a preferred outcome for a voter.

I think this is nearly the “right” notion of compliance. There is only slight room in choosing which maximal lottery to implement. For example, in case of degeneracy, one could choose a maximal lottery that optimizes expected score. Or, maybe compute Jeffrey’s prior over maximal lotteries, and then sample a maximal lottery accordingly.

What thoughts do others have?

@rob especially if the state is a swing state, making it more difficult for the large parties to secure voters for their platform I think would be a significant influence forcing large parties and their candidates to more scrutinizingly determine the real interests of voters in those states. It may dilute the interests of less competitive states, but since the competitive states are crucial to obtaining the presidency, the large parties will still have to invest strongly in the interests of voters in those states in order to compete with alternatives (and obviously each other) for the crucial swing points. This may lead to something like an arms race of concessions, which happened in New Zealand in 1996 and led to the national adoption of a PR system, according to Arend Lijphart. Obviously that's quite a leap for the U.S., but maybe a less extreme analogue is not so far-fetched.

Maine is one of the thirteen most competitive states for elections according to a 2016 analysis (Wikipedia: Swing state), so I’m not sure their recent establishment is actually strategically foolish, although it’s possible that it wasn’t fully thought through. I agree it isn't clear.

I think it will definitely be interesting to observe how the current political apparatus responds to Maine--and apparently, more recently, and strangely, Alaska:

https://news.yahoo.com/alaska-is-about-to-try-something-completely-new-in-the-fall-election-193615285.html

Since Alaska is far from competitive, I do think this transition was in fact foolish for the reasoning you stated, but it remains to be seen. If we saw a state like Florida transition to a system like Maine's, it would be very interesting to study the relative differences between federal treatments of Florida, Maine, and Alaska as a case study for how "swingy-ness" might influence the effect of such voting system transitions. If Maine experiences an increase in federal power, it would be a good case for the remaining swing states to make a similar transition. If that occurred, the swing states would become a platform foothold for alternative parties to grow.

@k98kurz I don’t think there should be any uncertainty in the default for a voter’s ballot.

@democrates I meant a Condorcet winner only among the front runners (for example, the candidates with the top K scores, here we are taking K=2). If there is no Condorcet winner among them, then we can choose the top scoring candidate.

In your case, if two candidates have the same second-greatest score, and the three front runners form a Condorcet cycle, then you can use the scores to break the tie. If this was used, then Jill Stein would have won the election.

That isn’t “the correct” solution (there is no such thing), but it is somewhat less arbitrary than flipping a coin or operating by alphabetical order, neither of which has anything to do with relevant information that is readily available on the ballots.

If we were being engineers about choosing a high quality candidate to win the election, we could even compute the distribution of scores, take the candidates whose scores exceed some elbow point, and find the Condorcet winner among those candidates with the top scoring candidate as the backup if no Condorcet winner exists. That’s basically a generalization of STAR with a dynamic front-runner selection method.

There are other ways to proceed. For example, we could remove Condorcet losers, then try to find the Condorcet winner of all remaining candidates, iteratively eliminating the lowest scoring candidate until a Condorcet winner emerges.

@k98kurz mirroring @Lime, I think any advantage conferred to one candidate over any other in an election should be granted on an opt in basis. A voter shouldn’t have to opt out from conferring an advantage to a candidate.

@toby-pereira I’m sure the courts will conjure up whatever question-begging definition of vote they need to for whatever ruling they decided on beforehand. I think getting the reasonable notions settled on to facilitate progress without constitutional amendments will require more lawyering than only appeals to reason. It’s unfortunate that Maine’s constitution encoded plurality into its state voting law, I think it’s important to know what other states might have this same kind of language issue in their constitutions.

@clay, this has become too sprawling to address productively all at once, so I’m going to isolate one point.

You write:

“Your alternative target—‘representation of constituent territorial units’—amounts to a different office, one answering to a federation of localities. That’s the boundary question again, which is upstream politics, and which I’ve never claimed the mechanism settles.”

That appears to concede the point I have been making. Whether a higher-level office represents individuals in one statewide constituency or instead coordinates constituent localities is an upstream political and constitutional choice. Sampling theory can evaluate a jury relative to whichever target is chosen, but it does not choose the target.

You may argue that the statewide individual-population target is preferable. I may argue that a more hierarchical or federated structure deserves consideration. That is a substantive institutional disagreement, not evidence that either side is statistically illiterate.

I am not going to respond simultaneously to every additional argument about score voting, Harsanyi, Reynolds v. Sims, subsidiarity, minority protection, and utility aggregation. That produces parallel monologues rather than examination. We should settle this first point before moving to the next one.

Moderator note: @clay, your tone is crossing the line for productive exchange.

Referring to another participant’s argument as “statistical nonsense” and “statistically illiterate nonsense,” and describing that participant as “deeply confused,” is not acceptable here. You may identify errors, criticize reasoning, and reject premises. Do not characterize another participant’s intelligence or competence.

The disagreement concerns the appropriate target and unit of political representation. Treating one side of that contested institutional question as evidence of statistical illiteracy is personal disparagement, not argument. Continue without such characterizations.

Returning to the substance in my capacity as a participant:

Districting is not merely a “hack.” It is a choice to give territorial constituencies standing within a federated political structure. Your argument assumes that the only legitimate target is the distribution of individual preferences across the entire population. That is one possible target, but it is not politically neutral and cannot be established by statistics alone.

Suppose 80 percent of a state’s population lives in a few coastal metropolitan areas and 20 percent lives across a large rural interior. A statewide uniform sample may accurately reproduce the numerical distribution of individual preferences. It does not follow that it provides an adequate mechanism for coordinating the distinct territorial interests, jurisdictions, infrastructure, resource use, and local conditions of the rural interior. A federation may deliberately give constituent territorial units institutional standing rather than permit every issue to be determined solely by aggregate population weight.

You write:

“this is a statistical distortion away from actual accurate representation.”

“Accurate representation” is undefined until you specify what is being represented. If the target is individual preferences in statewide proportion, then uniform sampling is accurate relative to that target. If the target includes representation of constituent territorial units, then stratification is part of the target rather than a distortion, as I have already stated. This seems to be a point of disagreement. If you believe this notion is erroneous, can you please identify the statistical or political premise you reject, and illustrate why?

Politics is not merely an exercise in estimating a population distribution. It is also a system for coordinating interests, jurisdictions, rights, obligations, and policies across differentiated communities. The desired representation must be judged relative to that political purpose. Statistics cannot choose the purpose for us.

You write:

“the district mandate is putting a thumb on the scale rather than letting voters decide.”

No. It selects a different representative unit. I am not arguing that an individual’s vote should count more because that individual’s preferences are rare. I am arguing that a federal structure may reasonably represent both persons and constituent territorial communities in order to coordinate geographically organized interests and prevent persistent statewide majorities concentrated in some regions from overriding sufficient political investment in smaller constituent regions.

Your example involving “Brian’s vote” therefore misses the argument. Territorial representation is not a reward for unusual preferences. It gives institutional standing to communities whose concerns are organized partly by geography: land use, water, transportation, extraction, agriculture, environmental exposure, infrastructure, policing, and local jurisdiction.

Geographic representation can certainly be designed badly. Districts may be unequal, arbitrary, or gerrymandered. But none of that proves that territorial representation is inherently irrational or “obviously suboptimal”; it shows that the structure must be designed carefully. Treating the entire state as a single constituency lies at the opposite end of the same design spectrum and is itself a districting and aggregation choice. For a large, territorially heterogeneous polity, that arrangement is not self-evidently ideal or stable.

You also say:

“there is no ‘supposed to’. there is no ‘ought’.”

That cannot be correct. The decision to define representation as proportional reproduction of individual statewide preferences is itself a normative institutional choice. Invoking what rational citizens would choose behind a veil of ignorance does not eliminate the normative question. A person who did not know whether they would belong to a dense metropolitan majority or a smaller rural region might reasonably prefer a system that protects both individual equality and some degree of territorial standing. They might reject a structure in which a geographically concentrated majority could permanently determine policies for regions with substantially different conditions and needs. The veil of ignorance therefore does not uniquely imply undifferentiated statewide representation.

The proper object of representation cannot be derived from sampling theory alone, because sampling theory evaluates procedures relative to a target that must first be specified. You have assumed a political objective and then labeled alternatives statistically inaccurate relative to that assumed objective. That does not establish that the objective itself is uniquely correct.

If you believe my position contains a contradiction, identify the propositions that generate it. Calling the position statistically illiterate does not demonstrate one.

@clay:

“It certainly wasn’t clear to me.”

You have made that clear. My point is that you have not identified anything incoherent in what I wrote.

I said:

“I do think some of the most sensitive aspects of implementing this kind of proposal would relate to the need for auditability by volunteer citizens or the press, and the possible need for an insulated environment for the jury, and those seem partly in conflict.”

That is a coherent statement. It identifies a possible tension between external scrutiny of the process and insulation of jurors from outside influence. You could reasonably have asked which parts of the process I thought should be auditable, or what form I thought the conflict might take. Instead, you said that you had no idea what I was talking about.

Likewise:

“By auditability, I mean of the process as a whole, by citizens who are not selected as jurors.”

The intended distinction is between scrutiny conducted internally by the jurors and scrutiny conducted externally by members of the public or press. That may require further specification, but it is not incomprehensible.

You now say that the transcript could be published, but that there is nothing for the public to audit because candidates can rebut one another. That does not resolve my concern. Publishing the information presented to the jury would allow the public and press to examine the claims, omissions, procedures, and informational environment that influenced the selection. Whether that scrutiny should create a formal remedy is a separate question from whether the process should be publicly inspectable.

You also say:

“you haven’t shown how we need auditability in terms of what goes on in the courtroom.”

Whether you think it is strictly necessary is not the only relevant question. A public demand for transparency and independent scrutiny would predictably arise around a process that selects public officials. That demand would have to be accommodated, rejected somehow, or limited through explicit institutional rules, which might themselves be unacceptable to the public.

You write:

“we want to prevent external information from entering the courtroom. no one ever said we need to insulate the public from receiving information from the process.”

Then we agree that information should flow outward. The remaining issue is the restriction on information flowing inward. Preventing selected jurors from receiving external political speech, reporting, or commentary would create tension with ordinary public political communication and would be difficult to enforce without intrusive restrictions on jurors’ media exposure and contact with the outside world.

On representation, you write:

“you want uniform sampling, so you get statistical validity.”

No. “Statistical validity” is not meaningful until the target of representation has been specified. Uniform statewide sampling is appropriate if the objective is to approximate the aggregate preferences of individuals in the state. It is not politically neutral to assume that this is the only legitimate object of representation.

My concern is that uniform statewide sampling may fail to give institutional standing to territorially organized interests. Large political systems almost always include geographically stratified representation because locality can carry politically relevant interests that are not reducible to individual population shares.

You then say that guaranteed territorial representation would introduce bias and reduce statistical accuracy. That conclusion follows only if the target has already been defined as the undifferentiated statewide population, which is precisely what I am contesting. If the institution is intended to represent both individuals and constituent localities, territorial stratification is part of the target rather than a distortion of it.

You also write:

“the district mandate is putting a thumb on the scale rather than letting voters decide.”

It is not simply a thumb on the scale. It is a different choice of representative unit. District-based representation guarantees territorial coverage and can reduce the redundancy produced when large numbers of people with correlated local interests are treated only as independent statewide observations. It may also ensure that smaller or geographically concentrated communities are present in the decision-making process.

A federation need not allocate political influence solely by counting individuals within one undifferentiated population. Distinct localities may require institutional standing because their interests, conditions, and vulnerabilities are not captured adequately by raw population weight alone.

That structure can certainly be designed badly. District boundaries can be arbitrary, unequal, or manipulated. But it is not therefore “obviously suboptimal.”

That is the point I have been trying to make. You are treating uniform statewide representation as neutral and alternatives as biased. I am saying that both arrangements embody prior political judgments about what the institution is supposed to represent.

There is also an institutional problem hidden inside the idea of insulation that @Toby-Pereira alluded to. Insulation has to be enforced by some government body or other administrative authority. That body would determine what information jurors may receive, what contact counts as improper, how violations are investigated, and what consequences follow. Those decisions could have a substantial effect on the election itself.

In other words, the institution charged with protecting the jury from outside influence could acquire outsized political influence through control of the jury’s informational environment and selective enforcement of the rules. That authority would itself need strong limits, transparency, independent review, and public auditability.

@clay I’m being pretty clear about what I mean. Please take some time to reciprocate the level of engagement I have given to your manifesto. I’ve explained my concerns in multiple ways; if a particular part remains unclear, you can ask a specific question about it.

By auditability, I mean of the process as a whole, by citizens who are not selected as jurors. The randomness, the information the jury is given, etc. are things that the public deserves the ability to audit for correctness and transparency. I don’t mean the secret ballots of the jurors.

“of course a jury has an insulated environment.”

Yes, that’s my point. An insulated environment is potentially in conflict with demand for external auditability of the process.

In terms of sampling, I am not asking which existing electorate should supply the random sample for an existing office. I understand that, under your proposal, a Senate jury would currently be sampled statewide.

I am questioning the prior institutional choice to treat the state as one undifferentiated constituency for that office, in the sense of sampling uniformly from the entire statewide population without guaranteeing representation to the local political units by which many interests and concerns are naturally organized. An alternative would give districts or localities guaranteed representation in higher-level decision-making, while still using equal random sampling within each locality.

By a hierarchical system, I mean one in which local constituencies select their own representatives or electors, and those delegates coordinate at progressively higher federal levels, rather than every higher-level institution drawing directly from the full aggregate population. In an election-by-jury context, representatives of localities could even negotiate terms under which their constituencies might be represented in higher-level juries—for example, the allocation of juror seats, guaranteed minimum representation, and the territorial units from which jurors are sampled.

These are questions about constituency structure, federal representation, and delegated authority. They also aren’t proposals for unequal sampling among individuals within a fixed constituency. They’re legitimate institutional questions that others evaluating the proposal are also likely to raise.

I also looked more closely at the Georgia examples, and to me they reinforce that these questions are not merely hypothetical. Georgia’s grand-jury appointment systems explicitly specify territorial representation. For example, the Cherokee County Water and Sewerage Authority has six directors appointed by the county grand jury: four representing separate districts, one representing the county at large, and one representing a participating municipality. The elected chair of the county commission serves as the seventh director:

https://ccwsa.com/about__trashed/history-of-ccwsa/

Henry County’s ethics-board law likewise required its five grand-jury appointees to reside in different commission districts, while Crisp County combines four grand-jury-appointed power commissioners with three elected county commissioners.

It would be a substantial research project to look into these implementations in detail, but my narrower point is that actual grand-jury appointment systems have incorporated additional political choices in line with the topics I’m trying to discuss.

@clay the more I think about this, the more I agree. Are there any initiatives for this to be done locally anywhere in the USA?

I do think some of the most sensitive aspects of implementing this kind of proposal would relate to the need for auditability by volunteer citizens or the press, and the possible need for an insulated environment for the jury, and those seem partly in conflict.

I already indicated my thoughts about the sampling rules for the jury in terms of district-based representation for higher level offices. Sometimes I wonder if a completely hierarchical system makes more sense, where districts elect representatives and electors for higher offices, and those electors handle the higher order coordination with other districts, etc.

@jack-waugh I agree with @clay here. I think acceptance of this is gaining traction.

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/495/approval-voting-as-a-workable-compromise/54

@clay I read through most of your manifesto, and I can get behind the proposal. You make clear arguments for the principles and goals. I think @Toby-Pereira‘s concerns are better calibrated to the issue than mine were, specifically about the information environment. That’s an implementation question, not necessarily a question about the goal.

Another practical implementation concern I have is auditing. By having everybody able to vote, there is no worry about manipulating juror selection.

@clay

“sampling inherits the frame, it doesn’t invent one, so there’s no political choice here that elections don’t already make.”

It inherits a political choice rather than eliminating one. Which constituency belongs to an office, which offices are territorial, which decisions are made at the district, state, or national level, and where the relevant boundaries lie are all politically consequential choices.

I agree that, conditional on a fixed office and electorate, uniform random sampling does not introduce an additional weighting rule. My point is that the frame cannot simply be treated as fixed. For example, a state could use one statewide jury, separate district juries, or some combination in which territorial units receive guaranteed representation. Those arrangements can give different populations different effective influence even when sampling is uniform within every unit.

“start with the criteria: who picks which groups get the multiplier, and on what basis?”

I am not necessarily proposing demographic vote multipliers. District-based representation is an institutional partition of constituencies and authority. The relevant questions are who determines those partitions, what interests justify them, and how resistant they are to strategic manipulation.

You later place sovereignty and other non-market claims under “subsidiarity, a boundary rather than a vote multiplier.” But that seems to concede the central point: boundaries are required to represent some politically relevant interests, and choosing those boundaries is itself a political process. Equal sampling within each resulting constituency does not settle which constituencies should exist.

“it’s the single rule that needs no authority to rank persons against each other, and the only one you’d accept without knowing which group you land in.”

That establishes an argument for equal inclusion probabilities within a specified constituency. It does not establish that a population-wide constituency is always the appropriate unit, or that future juries would retain the inherited allocation of authority and boundaries. A jury could conclude that geographically concentrated interests require district-like representation and reconstruct those strata without rejecting equal standing among persons.

@clay I think framing your argument less categorically would help it gain traction. You may be fully convinced by the proposal, but saying that there is “nothing to agree with,” that it is “objectively true,” and that its superiority is obvious bypasses the points that other people are actually disputing.

Some of your claims may follow once particular premises and goals are accepted. But whether those are the right premises, whether the proposed system achieves its goals, and whether its tradeoffs are acceptable are all matters that require collective judgment. They cannot simply be removed from disagreement by describing the conclusion as objective.

@Toby-Pereira‘a point about the manifesto is also reasonable. People generally need some reason to think a proposal is promising before investing the time required to study its full presentation. A forum discussion can provide that reason by introducing the argument incrementally and addressing the objections people raise from their current understanding.

I mention this because I have previously presented developed ideas here as finished packages and expected others to absorb the entire framework before engaging with them. I found that much less effective than establishing the premises one at a time and allowing the argument to develop through discussion.

@clay but “statistically random” does not define the constituencies from which the samples are being drawn. That is a political question, not a mathematical one.

As a thought experiment, suppose a jury itself were ideally representative in whatever sense is considered, and that they elected representatives. What stops those representatives from ultimately adjusting the manner in which future jurors are sampled? Especially, for example, if the question of stratification were raised as a political issue for jurors to consider, as it likely would be.

I think you should raise this as a separate topic here so we can all engage in a more organized way.