Not wholly sure whether this bears on the design of voting systems, but it looks as though it might.

@admin, @SaraWolk, for the home page, I like the version you have here with the white background and the huge buttons.

The archive pages should have, in my opinion, in addition to obviously their respective main contents, the following elements:

• an extremely clear indication that the user is in archive-land.
• link to the forum.
• breadcrumbs for navigating upward.

Do you have any suggestion for style and layout for the archive pages to look consistent with the home and "about" pages?

@SaraWolk This is a reply, so you can test whether you receive a notification.

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

@SaraWolk I think the version you propose in the sidebar would be fine, except that I would substitute "many" for "a large number of".

I think I have pretty good success at realizing the visual design and now I am fiddling with some details about the behavior that happens when one presses a button. Most people would just make those links, which would be trivial, but I am experimenting with an ability to navigate among some pages without causing the browser to refresh. Arguably, such navigation is not that valuable a feature for this application, but I am trying to build techniques for future work. I expect to front the design on our real home page in mere hours.

Reconciling different formats and relational schemata and schemes of identification should be interesting, but probably possible.

The archive from Discourse embodies a strict hierarchy. At the root, it has "categories", and with a category, "topics", and within a topic, posts. There are no multiples of tags or categories associated to anything. What data schema would unify the archives coming from different origins?

What is the most human-friendly way to URL-encode arbitrary trees of constraints linked with logical operators for a query?

I'm recommending that people do not include links pointing back to the old forum at CES, because CES will shut down that forum very soon, and such links would stop working.

I suggest that for now, if you want to respond to an old post, just quote extensively from it, and maybe even include some of the context from earlier messages of its thread.

I hope to receive an update to the archive. Once all the old material is published in the archive, it will be possible to link to items there.

Unfortunately, I don't expect I could prevail upon CES to support the legacy links and send them to process here.

We should try to recruit a second volunteer who can do SSH stuff. If anything happens to me, the project is too vulnerable. In particular, having a scheme for regular data backups is crucial. I have set up some such scheme, but a second pair of eyes on it would make it more robust.

@Psephomancy It's choking on my attempt to use the "import()" construct (having parentheses), which is supposed to allow a dynamic import. Either it doesn't know the construct or thinks it can only be used from a module. I guess it's a relatively new feature of the language. Maybe I can find a workaround.

I usually don't expand the list of replies. Consequently, I only see the copy at the end of the feed under the topic. Consequently, I usually only see one copy of each reply.

@SaraWolk Nevertheless, you have not as yet provided an example, starting with voter desire, and leading to different outcomes between STAR and Score.

@cfrank said in STAR vs. Score:

in my opinion STAR is way better than IRV.

No question.

I'm not sure why we can't have proxy representation; it seems to me to give the people more power than merely filling seats does.

But anyway, assuming proxy is off the table, what is the most important criterion for choosing among proportional voting systems?

@Keith said in Canada reform options:

@Jack-Waugh This is likely the best system to replace STV. I would suggest you familiarize yourself with it.

https://electowiki.org/wiki/Allocated_Score

I read through it once, but I didn't bother to contrast it with RRV.

@robertpdx said in Vote for 2 then Instant Runoff:

"Vote for 2" is a standard, well-accepted method for choosing two winners. And a runoff is the standard, well-accepted method for deciding between two candidates. So I propose to combine those two steps into a single election.

Right, well, that's an interesting point. If Vote for 2 then Instant Runoff can be sold to Joe Sixpack on account of its being based on well-accepted methods, but Approval cannot, because it is novel, then getting something better than FPtP/IRV in place may be better than nothing, in helping to replace the omnicidal regime with a people's regime.

@Marylander said in Approval vs. IRV:

[IRV] will strike out everyone but the top two, then pick the most preferred candidate between the two.

The current system does that just fine.

In conversation after conversation about the single-winner context, my interlocutors express doubt in the importance of balance.

In defending my position that balance matters, I invite you to join me in analyzing how Choose-one Plurality Voting empowers the ruling class. In talking about such an analysis, I will highlight a role played by lack of balance. I contend that this role is central to the mechanism.

Background readings:

• The "Cash3" document by Warren D. Smith, Ph. D.
• "The Equal Vote" by probably substantially Mark Frohnmayer and his father.
• The "Prisoner's Dilemma" thought experiment and paradigm for real experiments, from Game Theory.

[More later.]

If we abbreviate "Choose-one Plurality" as "COP", that can remind us of the "Good Cop, Bad Cop" scenario imposed on the Americans by the ruling class.

I am bringing, below, a backup copy of Warren D. Smith, Ph. D.'s "Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections." I attach great importance to this document. It is one of the two that I cite most often in trying to get people to see voting reform as the switch at the center of the difference between certain death and a possibility of life. Even though Dr. Smith's title for the writing mentions Score Voting, and even though within it, he specifically promotes Score Voting as the solution to the problem he describes, I do not promote this writing of his specifically in order to promote Score Voting as the sole solution. Rather, I promote this writing because it explains the current political predicament of the American people, which I think is substantially shared by UK residents and likely those of several other countries as well, but as a resident of the US, I concentrate on US politics. I believe that for a reasonable person, reading and understanding this writing of Smith's leads to an understanding that the general public in the US has almost no political power, and that all political power in the US rests with the super-rich. Because I want to emphasize the aspect of this document that it describes the problem, and de-emphasize its recommendation of Score Voting as the only solution, I tend to cite this document not by its title, but rather just by the name "Cash3" because the last slash-separated name in its URL is "Cash3.html". I see the document as describing, although in quite crude terms, a mechanism whereby the rich maintain power and exclude the public from power, and so I refer to this mechanism as "the 'Cash3' mechanism" because this document is the earliest, to my knowledge, to describe this mechanism in public. Reading it with somewhat Marxist glasses leads me to go further and say that all political power rests with capital itself.

I think it is important to store and publish backup copies of the "Cash3" document because I know nothing about how the online presence of the original is maintained. Maybe Smith does it by himself and when he reaches the end of his life, there might not be anyone positioned to take over, and so the domain registration and the servers might just get recycled.

Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections

If score voting were adopted, then it automatically would decrease the importance of money. We first must ask the underlying question: why is campaigning so absurdly expensive? When today's technology makes it easy and cheap to publicize your message? The reason is that

1. if you vote for Ralph Nader, you are, strategically speaking, an idiot. Hence it does not matter that Nader can make his message available, nor whether that message is good – still few will vote for him. Studies showed 90% of voters who regarded Nader & Buchanan as the best US presidential candidate in 2000, voted for somebody else. That's an insurmountable hurdle for everybody like Nader and an enormous distortion of democracy.
2. The reason for that is the plurality voting system's "wasted vote" mathematical pathology...
3. which does not exist with the "score voting" superior system...
4. in which there is no such thing as "vote splitting" and "wasted vote" hence no inherent strategic need for candidates to expensively convince voters they are one of the "2 most likely to win" so that it is non-idiotic to vote for them. Instead, voters can, with no idiocy at all, just score the good candidates high, not caring one whit about how much money they have or how likely or unlikely they are to win.

This all is a fact which the media virtually never talks about. Indeed they virtually never mention the importance of other voting systems even when it is staring them in the face, such as Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger (/Trump2015.html). In those cases, the entire real story was the voting system, but the media would simply not talk about that actual story. Not even for 1 sentence.

The strategy to stop money-corruption of politics must be 2-pronged: not only try to get money out of politics – a noble idea, but one which nobody has managed to do in 200 years of US history and even if done would be very vulnerable to cheating and backsliding and the fact the FEC almost never enforces even the lame laws we do have – but inherently decrease the importance of money. The latter idea is one almost nobody in the media talks about, and hence almost nobody knows about. (And if money mattered little, then that'd remove the incentive for cheating, partially solving the cheating and non-enforcement problems.)

Some other remarks on cash by Sherman/Smith/Carback

Some other remarks on cash by Rob Lanphier

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