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

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.

@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:

Yes, it is. The correct time to rail is right now, with the experience in Vermont and now with the newly experienced difficulties of Maine and NYC with administering RCV elections and getting timely results.

Let's rail, but let's rail on valid grounds only, lest we attract a reputation for disingenuous propaganda. Before the first successful powered flight by humans extended with machines, all prior efforts had failed. Eventually craft work and/or engineering advanced sufficiently to overcome the problems and reach the goal. Just because NYC flubbed up with administering RCV IRV Hare, doesn't mean a method of administering it that works better couldn't be engineered. Rob is saying let the precincts publish over the Internet the counts of all the ballot types cast there. Then anyone with a computer and a little knowledge of how to use it could reproduce the tally, and it would not take days (maybe it would take me days, but lots of others would do it in two hours and that includes research and reverse engineering the format and writing scripts).

@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.

@andy-dienes said in Back to Equal Weighting:

Likewise any voting method is "additive" by summing up # of ballots with ranking x, # of ballots with ranking y, # of ballots with ranking z, etc.

Rats.

The following construction is basically due to @cfrank; this tool NodeBB seems to make it hard for me to find the original post from him in which he gave the construction, but here is an equivalent one:

Ballots have two parts -- a choose-one part and a matching part. The matching part is an integer from -1000 through -1, but not zero, or an integer from 1 through 1000.

Before the tally, the ballots are searched for pairs of matching ballots. They match if the sum of their matching parts is zero. Each pair of matching ballots is thrown out. If one ballot matches more than one other ballot, only the one and one of the matches is thrown out.

The tally then proceeds as for Choose-one Plurality FPtP.

The system conforms to Frohnmayer balance (@SaraWolk @Sass).

For practical purposes, the system clearly does not provide equality. There will be practically no matches and so the system reduces to Choose-One, which clearly does not provide equality, because it splits votes.

Is the system additive? As you point out, it can be treated as additive by summing up the ballots having any given vote type.

So I don't know the mathematical definition that will restore equality to prominence.

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.

OK, it looks like Peltola won.

@toby-pereira said in A Municipality in Latvia Provides Equal Votes:

Are Jack Waugh and William Waugh the same person?

Yes. Sorry about any confusion. For a while, I was trying to use the William name for electoral politics, and the Jack name for continuing a career in coding up software. In the present project, the two interests met.

This forum was conceived as a replacement for a forum that the Center for Election Science had been operating and that they said they would shut down (and indeed eventually they did shut it down). The individuals conceiving it, and those originally did not include me, met as an "interim council". This interim council eventually formed the real council for overseeing the implementation and operation of this forum. So that is the history that explains why there is a "council" relative to this forum and why I feel some obligation to honor its dictates.

I am still trying to get the forum council to make a decision about the categories and some other questions. There are four members, including me. If we meet, it is my intention to resign from the council effective at the end of the meeting. One member seems to have a really busy schedule. Another has expressed willingness to meet. From another, I have not heard lately. I don't recall if the council ever decided a rule for itself about requiring a quorum to make a decision.

Not sure based on what criteria/constraints stakeholders should consider giving up on the current council and forming a new regime for running this forum. I do not want to participate in deciding that (because of what has been said about my posts being inappropriate). But I have the keys to the domain registration, so some action by me would be necessary to put any revolution in power.

Even as I plan to reduce my arguing in this forum and withdraw from decisionmaking processes, I plan to continue to offer technical consulting for free for what it may be worth. I have some rudimentary understanding about at least one technique for hosting, that being the technique currently in effect. I wrote the archive code and plan to respond about any defects in it about which I may happen to receive reports.

Coming Soon -- Slider-controlled Simulator α Release

Get ready.

I wrote directly to David H. to try to get his attention.

The main font we use (chosen by Sara Wolk) for the home page and the archive seems to have lost a lot of weight all of a sudden. This is from Google and I never figured out how to capture a local copy of it and so the front end always gets it from Google. I suppose Google has changed something about the published version and that caused the problem. I think the best solution would be to switch to a font that is built in to typical browsers.

I believe that you can reduce the concerns that Gibbard... noted to be so small that they effectively don't exist.

On what grounds?

If one park is known to contain unsound trees but another park has been maintained by competent arborists, that makes for a strong reason to choose one park over the other to walk in, especially if when I walk, I have in my backpack the future of my country and the human species.

I'm suggesting that with Score, strategic voting is not an evil and does not lead to vote splitting. Everyone can be taught the best known strategy at any given time (depending on the state of mathematical knowledge at that time), and by applying the strategy, they get equal power to the other voters. This will prevent vote splitting, because vote splitting and unequal power are intimately related.

The voters could be told that exaggerating your support for your lesser evil is not unethical, on the grounds that a vote is an exercise of political power, not the answering of an opinion poll, and so it doesn't carry a responsibility for "honesty". However, ethics requires exercising your power in a way that would tend to promote the good of the residents of the polity concerned and does not contribute to the likelihood of collective unethical behavior.

I believe that you can reduce the concerns that Gibbard/Arrow noted to be so small that they effectively don't exist.

On what grounds? Let's lay Arrow aside for the moment and concentrate on just Gibbard.

OK, it looks like Peltola won.

@rob said in Symmetrical IRV:

If the goal is to reduce the incentive to strategically vote

Why is this a worthwhile subgoal toward achieving the larger goal of eliminating vote splitting?

@rob said in Symmetrical IRV:

I believe that you can reduce the concerns that Gibbard/Arrow noted to be so small that they effectively don't exist.

On what grounds?

Why not see Score as 100% perfect?

@rob How can the degrees of vulnerability to Gibbard be characterized? At this point, I'm not even asking how it could be estimated of a given voting system. Just, on what sort of a scale could the result of such an estimation be placed.