I am in touch with a group of people who think they are working on a platform for a national-level political party (I am a full voting member). They have heard of STAR and are acquainted with one or two people whose opinions they respect who favor STAR. I think I have convinced them that the platform should not call for a single voting system for all uses, on the grounds that circumstances differ and that State parties should decide based on the circumstances. The draft provisions being passed around in the group tend to mention more than one voting system. But, I want to convince them not to include any favorable mention of RCV/IRV whatsoever. What is the most convincing argument I can take to them that the risk of a spoiler effect is too high with IRV?

@Toby-Pereira Maybe I can get them with a limited form of screen scraping.

Or maybe @SaraWolk can prevail upon CES to give us the images. I have no sway to even get CES to acknowledge receipt of a message. While she is at it, she could also ask them for an updated dump of the other data, or just the items added or changed since they sent us the dump they sent.

The first image in that post, on the original site (implemented with Discourse) is rendered with a document element as the following HTML would specify:

<img src="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png" alt="Voters" data-base62-sha1="tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp" class="d-lazyload" srcset="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_865x748.png 1.5x, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/original/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33.png 2x" width="577" height="499">

The reference to it in the data dump that we received from CES and on which I base the archive, looks like this:

<img src="upload://tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp.png" alt="Voters|577x499">

upload: is not a legal scheme for use in a URI. Discourse is parsing it and substituting the long version as above.

Maybe in exchange for an annual monetary tribute, CES would be willing to keep the original site up.

Every Tuesday, at 20:00 New York time (16:00 UTC), @Sass answers questions on voting systems at bit.ly/democracy-discussions

Thanks for pointing out that omission. The info has been available via published minutes of the forum council, but it's better to have a summary in the present category (which is whither the "About" button on the home page leads), so I posted it.

I see no low-cost, no-risk solution to a question regarding control of this domain name in case someone dies or otherwise becomes incapacitated. The domain registrar firm understands a relationship with an individual, and maybe a legal entity could be substituted for the individual. But as far as I know, creating a legal entity requires paying a lawyer, and I am unwilling to do that. But the current situation is that so far as the domain registrar firm is concerned, a single human individual owns this domain name. That individual has a credit card, the registrar is able to charge this credit card, and will do so if someone who knows the password orders more services. I am sure it is no surprise to any of you that I am that individual. With no arrangements in place other than these, the forum users bear a risk that I die from CoVid19 or getting run over by a truck or whatever (I am almost 70), and no one renews the domain, and so it expires, which would lead to the forum going under. So a possible solution is I could place trust in several of you to control the domain, and tell you the password, but then I would be effectively putting people I don't really know all that well in a position where they could hit my credit card. I suppose I could make some of you the executors of my estate in my last will and testament. Then you'd have to show the domain registrar your letters testamentary so you could take control of the account. I don't know whether the firm would respond in a timely fashion to such a communication.

The _equalvote.org_ organization has decided to accept this discussion forum as a partner organization. They are a legal entity (I guess) and so the obvious solution would be to transfer the domain name to their control. Then if whoever is in control of the server (again, that is currently I) become unresponsive and someone else has a backup and wants to bring up a new server with the data and code, they can just e'splain that to equalvote.org and it can point the domain name to the new server. I guess I would like to see some statement by active users of the forum that they are willing to trust equalvote.org to that degree, if that is going to be the solution.

@rob @paretoman @Casimir @Andy-Dienes @last19digitsofpi @masiarek @culi @rb-j @marcosb @BTernaryTau @BetterVoting @frenzed @Keith-Edmonds @Toby-Pereira @wolftune @Ted-Stern @wbport @multi_system_fan @Psephomancy @robertpdx @tec @Essenzia

@rob said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting".

I agree. I think it doesn't occur to most US people that more than one way to vote would be possible, and so it doesn't enter their mind to have a term for the way they do it as to be distinguished from possible other ways.

In one of the antisocial media, when I mentioned some alternative system, someone responded that that would be fake voting.

I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives". I put those terms in quotes because I am referring to people using those terms. I do not know what the users of those terms think the "conservatives" want to conserve or what the "liberals" want to liberate. I would use the terms without horror quotes if I stood ready to answer those questions should you ask them of me.

https://electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-election-the-limits-of-ranked-choice-voting/

@SaraWolk outside-the-box thinking should be hyphenated.

@Toby-Pereira said in STAR-like method ("reverse STAR"?):

Copeland

Which leads down a rabbit-hole all the way back to the middle ages and writings in Latin. https://d-nb.info/1212798317/34 talks about the sources and gives text and translations in PDF, and leads to https://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/htdocs/emeriti/pukelsheim/llull/ , which gives the text and translations as web pages.

Our Internet Domains

We are holding:

votingtheory.org ($14/yr)
votingtheory.com ($9/yr)
votingtheory.net ($12/yr)
voting-theory.com ($9/yr)

Obviously, we have to keep votingtheory.org, because that's our official domain. So I will renew that right after the meeting.

During our founding meeting, I grabbed voting-theory.com (note the hyphen) by mistake. So I'm planning to cancel that.

A user of the old forum advised we grab the .com and .net names to avoid being impersonated by any unfriendly agents who could turn up. I don't know how important this is. If the council decides to keep them and can raise the money other than from me, I will cooperate with the decision. Otherwise, I am inclined to drop them.

Our other money expense is $60/yr. for the server. This could reasonably double if we get a second server in a different city to hold backup data. Currently, my personal server, which I am paying for anyway for other purposes, is holding the backups. I should double check whether the backup mechanism I set up is really working.

As I mentioned, I hope we can recruit someone as treasurer.

As I have also mentioned, in regard to tech support, we are in a more vulnerable position than would be ideal, because it all currently depends on one person (me). I don't mind doing it, but something could always happen to me (as something could happen to any single individual person). If someone can offer back-up support, they should submit their SSH public key.

In solidarity for a better tomorrow (or at least, a tomorrow),

They said they would post a recording of the debate on Youtube.

It was generally rather biased against alternatives to Hare.

Maybe it would make sense to regard a canonical preference matrix as having only an upper triangle. However, for software, I think it is convenient to represent it using the whole matrix.

@sarawolk You can draw a line between the names of the candidates you support and the rest.

Maybe the differences across the values at i, j and j, i are the same and are all that matter? @Sass?

I suspect that the ~rlegrand tool is counting equal rankings by giving a half point to each candidate in the pair.

How (or should) we change elections? Listen to our panel of experts debate whether elections should use ranked-choice voting and how we can improve voting more broadly.
Sign up for National Debate: Improving the Vote?
September 21 at 8 p.m. ET

Guests will be able to submit questions, but I don't see a way to submit a remark or a position. None of the panelists is a known (to me) advocate of equality or rating.

@psp_andrew-s said in **INTRODUCING** 2-Choice Voting (2CV) - An Improved Iteration on RCV and STAR:

acceptance/preference from among 51% of the entire voting population.

Otherwise, the election is thrown and new candidates sought?

@cfrank, using the grouping that you describe in 2881, votes that look formally "opposite" would be separated into different groups wrt ea pair of candidates, and so I'm pretty sure it would break the balance.

basically just a particular Condorcet method.

It collects more information than most, and goes beyond mere ranking.

@cfrank said in Rank with cutoff runoff 2.0:

spiral quickly into becoming as convoluted as possible.

An alternative is the opposite: make them as simple and transparent as possible, so everyone engages in them and achieves equal power to everyone else.

This is an example system with two distinct aspects in every vote. For which of such systems can we say that it suffices (for an optimal vote) to Gibbard just one of the aspects and vote your values in the other aspect?

@cfrank said in Rank with cutoff runoff 2.0:

why not simply place the cutoff between the two candidates with the largest difference?

Because when many voters choose randomly, the effect is the same as though fine-grained Score ballots were being collected and tallied, and I believe that the finer grain has better effect at defeating money and fame effects.