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.

@rob I repeat, however, that there is a time limit for appending comments.

@rob, yes, I started to argue with him in the same direction as yours, but instead of carrying the argument all the way through, I paused in the middle of it to see whether he was following me so far. He evidently has family trouble and has had to throttle his level of attention on my responses.

Maybe it should be called "LLull Then Score", abbreviated LLTS.

Paul Cohen comments on this method (I had brought it to his attention (writing under my real name, William Waugh)). One can reply in the publication he uses if one is fast enough. After a certain timeout period, it becomes impossible to add a comment to a given article without supporting the publication with money. I don't know how many or few people read his posts.

I am posting to indicate that I have not abandoned the simulation project; I am gradually trying to progress it. I don't expect a response unless you think I have left something important out or am painting myself into a corner with the design choices I am laying out.

I asked myself: What are we going to read from the file directories and how will what we read figure in during prompting and execution?

At the indicative level, a voting system declares what form of ballot it requires.

Tactics, at the indicative level, will be able to answer given a ballot form, are they capable of generating ballots conforming thereto.

So, when the user selects a voting system, the app will offer the tactics that can produce ballots for that system.

Since tactics will have an indicative level and an executive level, they must comprise at least two files, so it makes sense to use a directory for each tactic.

So there will be one directory containing the subdirectories for the voting systems and one directory containing the subdirectories for the tactics. There is no need for the hierarchy of directories to reflect any kind of categorization of either. So, for example, there will not be a directory of ranking voting systems nor a directory of rating voting systems nor a directory of Condorcet-compliant voting systems, etc.

Example declarations of ballot types:

{
  [0]: 'rating',
  finite: false,  /* Continuous -- allows floating-point ratings. */
  min: 0,
  max: 1,
}

{
  [0]: 'rating',
  finite: true,
  range: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5],  /* like STAR */
}

{
  [0]: 'ranking',
  equal_ranking_allowed: true,
}

Here's Approval:

{
  [0]: 'rating',
  finite: true,
  range: [0, 1],  /* Approval */
}

@psephomancy, do you still love Waterfox Classic? There is a discussion about its future at https://www.reddit.com/r/waterfox/comments/ycavbd/is_classic_abandoned/

@rob I prefer the current way, where it is completely parsed, to the alternative you mention, which would require further parsing (even so simple as with one .split("=")).

@rob said in Ballot Types in Simulation:

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/gOrLLxP

I see it; thanks.

@rob said in Ballot Types in Simulation:

how else could you do it

I don't know that there is any other reasonable way to do it. I hadn't worked out a way, and I was just remarking that I understood how you were doing it as a result of my reverse engineering. I can see using the same format with names or IDs or indices.

I erred by not trying to draft in the first place a tally that would take equal ranking. Once such a tally is working, it won't care whether arbitrary and evil restrictions are imposed with respect to the ballots before they are handed to the tally. It is only up to the voting decision procedures to obey such restrictions or not, depending on what purpose they are designed for.

In regard to names, my idea has been that a given tallying algorithm would get called at first without names, since they have no bearing on the tally. The tally would return the set of candidates (by index) who tied for the win and a closure to be called later to report, rendered into DOM elements, the details of how the tally went. The candidate names would be supplied on this second call. But if you say it is your earnest opinion that the names should come along in the first call, I will change the design accordingly. I think there is something to be said for my putting some value on making it smooth for either of us to adapt code written for one context to run in the other. No need to duplicate effort in writing tallying algorithms, I suppose, if we can manage to make them understandable to each other.

@rob class PairwiseResults defines .tabulate (ballots) but that is never called.