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.

@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.

Two places to look (unrelated to one another (so far)):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_Voting_Party

• https://www.guilded.gg/United-Peoples-Assembly/groups/l3GWYRK3/channels/9c6545c7-15e9-4e59-8173-e86a6375807a/forums/1808331575

The second link requires admission, but admission will probably be forthcoming. This is United People's Assembly, a group of people still debating what formal mandate to take on, but I think the general opinion is in favor of parties in every State, forming a new one and/or working with existing ones, plus in one sense or another a national organization to help make all that work together. The national organization could qualify as a party under FEC rules after sufficient count of State parties agree to make coalition at the national level. Much of the spearheading is coming from Washington (the State, not DC).

In regard to the Green Party of the USA, I have experience that convinces me they are stuck on IRV and laugh at the idea that there is anything wrong with it.

@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?

@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

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

@cfrank said in The Condorcet Criterion:

assumes that in any head-to-head election there is an objectively ``better" choice

This is consistent with the fact that the pioneer of systems that we would today characterize as Condorcet-compliant was a Catholic apologist. Catholics and more broadly Christians and even more broadly Abrahamics believe in one god, whom they write about as though his name were God. Llull thought that when the leader of a monastery or a convent died, there would be one best candidate to replace that leader, and that God knew who that would be, and the monks or nuns would just have to ask each other for opinions and aggregate those properly to fix on the correct answer.

@rob I am now formatting the dates that are associated to the posts.

Topics used to show all the details, including creation date. I no longer show any details for them, just the title of the topic.

I believe there were no other contexts in which dates showed up, just those two.

Of course, post headers themselves show up in three contexts: posts for a topic, a single post, and search results.

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

I see that three writings on how to elect by Llull seeem to have survived. He wrote the oldest one before 1283.

I judge that the system Llull first describes tries to make a good decision in case of what today we would call a Condorcet cycle, asking the voters to vote again, and falling back to randomness if the cycle persists. But in his later two writings, he just recommends a round-robin comparison. If there is no Condorcet cycle, this should find the winner. But if there would be a cycle, the procedure doesn't detect it and just elects some candidate in the cycle, determined by the order in which the candidates are brought into comparison.

In the first writing, he gives a diagram illustrating the exhaustive list of pairs of candidates. This is used to collect the comparison of every candidate to every other. It's a bit puzzling to me that the later writings still refer back to the diagram. They don't recommend using it in any particular way, and I don't see that it would really be any use, given that round-robin matching is used. The number of comparisons is on the order of the number of candidates rather than the square of the number.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Latvia-Wisely-Chose-to-Ado-by-Paul-Cohen-Approval-Voting_Balanced-Approval-Voting_Election-Reform_Election-Reform-Activism-220524-333.html#comment810036

My first impression is that it is too difficult to understand and explain.

Every Tuesday, at 20:00 New York time (16:00 UTC), @Sass answers questions on voting systems at https://meet.google.com/obh-wzvd-oxu

An effort by W. D. Smith (and others?) produced an estimate of the relative importance of voting reforms. He/they use the "invention of democracy" as their measuring stick and attempt to compare to that, quantitatively, the replacement of the electoral college with a direct vote, woman suffrage, election fraud and manipulation, turnout biases, Gerrymandering, votes for Black people, and the change from choose-one plurality to a system that resists vote splitting.

My comment is on his assumption that the quantitative effect of the "invention of democracy" is the magnitude of difference between random choice and (strategic) choose-one plurality voting. But in fact the prior art before voting was not random choice. It was hereditary monarchy. And I suppose that could have been better or worse than random choice.

@marylander said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:

find the election with a different outcome of nearest distance to the election that is expected

Your choice of concepts invites me to reexamine which ones I'm emphasizing when thinking about strategy. A way to look at is to start by asking whether the freedom of movement available to our faction allows us cast better than a naïve vote in terms of the quality of the electoral outcome as measured by our values. The expected election might be the one that would result if we voted naïvely and our opponents bullet voted. If there's an algorithm that explores all around the envelope of what we can do in search of a better outcome, assuming the opponents continue to bullet vote, that could be interesting. If no better alternative election is found within that freedom of movement, we should vote naïvely in order to avoid perturbing the secondary indications of the election. If more than one better election is found, we should try to force the best one.

@rob I feel there is a certain amount of demerit in my spending more time jawboning about the simulation I have in mind than coding it. Nevertheless.

I am choosing to exclude from the scope of the simulation, any modeling of how or why the voters come to the evaluations they have of the candidates. I want to simply allow the researcher (the user) to specify those. The purpose of running the simulations is to see which combinations of strategies and voting systems do better in the sense of tipping the result the way the researcher is interested in (presumably, toward defeating the duopoly) with the least support in terms of count of voters on one side or the other with respect to whatever polarization interests the researcher. My idea is to allow the researcher to find this tipping point by titration, by adjusting a slider control back and forth and observing when the combinations of voting systems with strategies for them tip between electing the sort of candidate the researcher supports to the sort the researcher opposes. The slider position will affect the numbers of voters holding certain valuations of the candidates and nothing else. The valuations will drive the votes via the strategies. Every seriously proposed voting system has an obvious naïve strategy, and I will offer that in all cases.

For Condorcet and IRV, I don't know offhand any strategies to offer other than the naïve strategy, which is just to order the candidates according to preference. This is the strategy recommended by IRV advocates.

For Score (and STAR), the popularity of the preferred candidate is directly available in the simulation (as it would not be in real life) from the evaluations of the voters toward the candidates. A threshold could be chosen based on what the candidate scores would be in a forced "honest" Score election, based on reading the voters' minds rather than giving them freedom of choice. Maybe instead of a hard threshold, this should be a parameter to choose a logistic function through which to map the scores given to the middle candidates. I'm not sure whether that makes sense; it's just an idea. But generally, the idea is that if honest scoring would elect Nader, there is no need to settle for Gore or Bush, whichever we judge to be the lesser evil. But if Nader is polling at 1%, we might care about the Gore-Bush part of the election and would want to exaggerate support for the lesser evil.

So, my assumption is that all voters are perfectly good at guessing what the other voters want (not how they will vote), and as good as the author of the strategy routine at choosing an advantageous strategy. The reason for these assumptions is I am trying to pit the voting systems against each other, above all else. I want to find out, and show others, circumstances where one voting system "works" better than the other at overcoming the kinds of antidemocratic behaviors that FPtP exhibits. I believe that when a system has been in place for several elections, all factions will figure out how best to game it for their purposes, to the extent that is possible. My grounds for expecting this are general Darwinism plus the experience that every American knows that a naïve choice under FPtP is not always the most advantageous choice.

I haven't thought about any simulation that would address the choice that a potential candidate would make to run or not run, as a variable to be computed. But the choice not to run in FPtP is an example of how the public has come to understand strategy.

@rob said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:

what approach you are using to simulate strategy

I haven't implemented anything yet, but was thinking along the lines of heuristics. I would make available to the strategic code, the preferences of all the factions (a more sophisticated simulation for some purposes could blur these, but to start with, I would provide them verbatim). If the favorite candidate of the faction the code is working for at the moment is unpopular, the code would look for a lesser evil. For Score, the less popular the preferred candidate is, the greater the degree to which the support for the lesser evil would be exaggerated.

@rob, thanks for that link to the code.

I wasn't looking just for algorithms, but more particularly, to know the techniques whereby they are carried out and whereby the inputs and results are coupled from and to the rest of the program.

I see that you use imperative style and native looping constructs + setTimeout.

@rob In regard to "factions":

First off, I should clarify that the person I mean by "user" is the one who is describing the candidate list, the electorate, etc. for a simulation. In short, defining the problem the simulator is tasked to solve. No programming skill is required of the user. I'm thinking that a guest programmer would give me their code and I would integrate it in the framework.

If the user wants to describe an electorate with a thousand voters, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million, said user (U) is not going to want to sit there and list for each of the million voters, that voter's evaluations of the maybe 18 candidates. Instead, the user should be able to describe chunks of voters who share the same evaluations. I have been calling such chunks of like-minded voters "factions". Do you propose a different name and/or a different scheme for what options are open to the user in laying out the problem?

In regard to the Codepen tool:

What constraints does it impose that wouldn't apply to a website that I might implement?

In regard to the programming language and to an example:

You have chosen Javascript. So what I would be interested in seeing from you is an example strategy function in Javascript. Again, it doesn't have to be tested. It can be a first draft.

Maybe for modeling uncertainty, the presentation should be a series of "polls" that inaccurately indicate the stances of the factions in the overall electorate.