Is there a place which lists the moderators, admins and such for https://www.votingtheory.org/? It would be good to have transparency about the people who helped to make this and their relevant affiliations.

@Jack-Waugh What STAR does is it renormalizes everybodies vote weight to give them the same impact. This is an attempt to reduce the amount of strategy needed. I do not think that it would outperform somebody who used optimal strategy with score. The point is that most people do not or cannot use optimal strategy. STAR then puts people bad at strategy on a closer level to those who are good at strategy. So I do not think you are wrong in what you say. If all people where fully informed, rational and strategic then score would likely be better. However, people are not any of those things in general. I do not think your like of argument will hold up under this consideration.

An example of where score produces a better outcome than score is

40% = A:5 B:0 C:0
31% = A:0 B:5 C:1
29% = A:0 B:1 C:5

Score give A and STAR gives B. This is an engineered and somewhat extreme example to illustrate the issue. Is 5 infinitely more than 0 or just 5. Is 5 weighted as 4 more than 1 or 5 times. There is no universal metric and different people will choose different metrics. STAR normalizes it all away and compares the two most favoured with full weight to each voter.

STAR is a simplified version of Baldwin's Method. When you think about it that way you see the intent.

@cfrank said in Quadratic Voting:

Social choice theory is a subfield of economics, Kenneth Arrow was an economist.

It is a specialized field. Thomas Hare was a political scientist. I am a physicist. Warren Smith is a com Sci person. It is its own field.

I would like to hear more about what you have said in the past about why this system is not at all reasonable.

There was a discussion I started about Quadratic voting on the now decommissioned CES forum a few years ago. It is now archived on the here
https://www.votingtheory.org/archive/posts?where={"topic_id"%3A541}

I'm not sure what is so terrible about it, especially in a multi-winner context.

It has vote splitting and gives low PR. It is not "terrible" but it is not worth considering given that you have simpler systems which do not have vote splitting and give high PR.

Here is another good article

https://psephomancy.medium.com/a-majority-of-voters-1d990a53b089

@micahscopes said in Hello from Micah:

I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems".

I have found that everybody ends up there eventually

@frenzed If the goal is exact PR then why even have a threshold. I thought we did not want exact PR.

But more on topic I think you are making 2 assumptions you do not know you are making. You assume at all existing parties are independent and uncorrelated. More mathematically, the assumption is that the parties form an orthogonal basis for a political space. This is quite clearly false and I hope I do not need to explain why.

Secondly, by having all of a voters endorsement put towards one party you are preventing exact PR. In fact I would think that in general this effect is larger than the effect you are brining up here. To do this properly you would need to know the vector representation of each voter in the space defined by the parties. Having that you could calculated exact PR.

@Jack-Waugh The word strategy appears several times on that page. I do not now exactly how he coded the different strategies but I figure that could help you on your way to doing research.

I am unaware of any property called "the balance condition" and electowiki does not have such a page. Do you intend to refer to The Test of Balance given here. If so I think what you are saying is that in Nash equilibrium two systems which pass this criteria should behave such that the strategy of different factions cancel each other out and they both produce the same winner. The flaw in that logic is the assumption of an underlying symmetry in the size of groups and how that interacts with compromise/utilitarian or majoritarian winners. As I said above, STAR is majoritarian and Score is Utilitarian. In the absence of strategy these systems will give different winners. So even if all the strategy cancelled you would not expect the same winners.

@Jack-Waugh said in Advocate for Utilitarianism Within the Movement for a People's Party:

so my suggestion is that a good place to advocate for it is inside of the MPP.

If your statement is "we should convince MPP to adopt a utilitarian method" not "we should support the MMP" then I take no issue. Yes we should try to get all organizations big an small to adopt better methods. The CES is also doing this. It is not just about municipal elections but they are pushing approval in organizations too.

@Jack-Waugh said in Advocate for Utilitarianism Within the Movement for a People's Party:

Their stated intention from the start is to form a new major party.

Of course all new parties want that. My point was more that they are likely to be a small party not that they want to be one.

You are correct that more than half of the voters are not happy with the Dems or Republicans. However, the existing system gives huge strategic advantage to the top two existing parties. If you look to the peoples party in Canada (The PPC) they attempted a similar thing and got nowhere.

I do not question that they have good and noble goals within their ideology. However, their ideology is aligned with the Bernie movement. It has a stated political ideology and one which is basically left of the existing parties.

So yes lets tell them that that they are wrong about voting systems. But I think it goes outside this forum advocate for them and their ideology of democratic socialism. I do not want this to become a debate forum for economics. I love to debate economics and would be happy to debate why I think the Chicago or neo-Keynsian schools of economics are better than any centrally planned system. Just not here.

So if I was to "infiltrate" them I would want to change more than just their stance on voting. If you align with their ideological policy and want to try to push their agenda then great. If you want to try to get them on board with Cardinal systems then that is a perfect topic for this forum. However, my caution is to not advocate for the party or its policies here. I suspect it will degenerate into off topic discussions and bring division into the voting theory community. I would never tell you what to do. I just wanted to caution you.

@frenzed Welcome. This is a topic I have thought about before. I do not like voting for parties as a rule so I have not bothered to put time into it. I do however I have an idea how to fix this properly. I put a longer explanation on the other post.

@SaraWolk said in Successive Rank Voting:

All voting methods which pass Later No Harm fail Favorite Betrayal Criteria,

Also worth pointing out that you must have "later No Harm" (non-compromising) or the chicken dilemma. Later no harm can cause you to get the wrong winner when everybody is honest but Chicken Dilemma stratigies only have pay off if the strategy is used effectively and can also cost you. In STAR the cost of the alternative vs the favorite is 1/5. ie if you want to minimally score a lesser evil you would give them a 1. This makes the chicken dilemma 5 times less incentivized than in Approval.

If you want to take this to the extreme you could argue that giving the lesser evil 1/5 of our favorite is too much. We could do STAR on a [0,100] scale or even more. Clearly this would allow more expression at the cost of complexity. If it was a zero to 1 million then I am sure your complaint about STAR would vanish. Fundamentally I do not think your issue is with STAR itself but in this one scenario where 5-STAR is not expressive enough. Where is the line where you would make a cut off on the ganularity?

@brozai said in Approval is Sincere:

I think it might be a little stronger than just Monotonicity?

Yes, I think you are right

@brozai Its worth pointing out that this is just a restatement of Monotonicity by their definition of sincere. If A > B and B is approved then A is also approved. The " B is approved " part is crucial because the form of insincere voting in Approval is understood through the chicken dilemma. So there is a strategic problem with approval

Another interesting point is that you can use mathematical induction to take the approval case and expand it to Score voting

@denis-falvey Welcome.

the logic of my objective measures of democracy and local representation,

Do you have documentation on this in something succinct. You may have trouble getting people interested in reading a longer form essay specific to a Country. If you have short summaries of these objective measure please provide a link.

If you do not have such documentation, electowiki.org/ would be a great place to put it. There already exists a page for the concept of Proportionate Representation which is important in the Canadian Constitution.

https://electowiki.org/wiki/Proportionate_representation

Is this what your measure of local representation is quantifying? If not there are several others
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Category:Types_of_representation

@cfrank said in Quadratic Voting:

Social choice theory is a subfield of economics, Kenneth Arrow was an economist.

It is a specialized field. Thomas Hare was a political scientist. I am a physicist. Warren Smith is a com Sci person. It is its own field.

I would like to hear more about what you have said in the past about why this system is not at all reasonable.

There was a discussion I started about Quadratic voting on the now decommissioned CES forum a few years ago. It is now archived on the here
https://www.votingtheory.org/archive/posts?where={"topic_id"%3A541}

I'm not sure what is so terrible about it, especially in a multi-winner context.

It has vote splitting and gives low PR. It is not "terrible" but it is not worth considering given that you have simpler systems which do not have vote splitting and give high PR.

@dave said in SMDPR:

I looked into it for a minute and it seemed as if it required 2 people per riding.

You can also just double the size of the district.

The % support of the displaced candidates was 39.53 for 7.50, 39.25 for 7.06, 40.55 for 6.52, 45.89 for 6.29, & 45.62 for 6.26%.

All PR systems do this in one way or another but this is much more in the open. I wonder how public opinion on that will be.

I don't know much about score ballots but am afraid they might exclude independents as well. If not, I'm open for change.

The information you put on the ballot is independent of the candidates. Score would actually reduce vote splitting so help independents in the end.

The other reason I don't like changing the ballot is that a lot of voters might have difficulty understanding how to vote.

Score is just giving a rating. People do this all the time. There are studies that show it is faster for people to rate a bunch of things that choose their favourite. Ranking is the slowest.

@cfrank said in Quadratic Voting:

It seems promising that a state-level house of representatives was willing to use it, and that it was proposed by Nobel Laureate professor of economics William Vickrey.

Governments make terrible decisions all the time and I would not take medical advice from an engineer any more than voting theory advice from an economist.

I have talked about this a lot in the past and it does not seem like a reasonable system at all. A quadratic penalty in a machine learning or economics framework makes sense but this is the wrong tool for this case. Its a bad attempt to fix a bad system. I would spend your time elsewhere

@cfrank What are the upsides of this? It seems like a worse version of cumulative voting and that is already a pretty terrible system.

@dave said in SMDPR:

There is no need to increase the number of MP's as you would in DMP?

This is not a requirement in DMP.

SMDPR as I have it includes independents.

How could an independent win? They would have to have nearly all votes in the riding. They are a best facing a huge disadvantage.

In Ontario in 2019, SMDPR gave the Greens 8 seats all of which had at least 5% of the vote in their ridings: 25.99, 25.46, 10.86, 7.50, 7.06, 6.52, 6.29, & 6.26%.

What was the % of support for the FPTP winner who was displaced by a green with less than 10%?

What do you think about doing a more sophisticated version of this with score ballots or something?

@dave Welcome.

I made a post about SMDPR a few days back. It is here

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/159/smdpr

@frenzed I understand the system you propose and the justification for it. It does however have the flaws I brought up.

I do not think moving to a score ballot instead of a "rank two" as you propose is a much bigger change. It would give better results and completely solve the issue you are concerned about.