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.

Things like utility variance or fraction of electorate with/without a winner among their top choices work to a point, but do not seem particularly theoretically motivated.

If you look at some of the metrics I used in this simulation from the last Equal Vote Committee you will see that I used such metrics. This may be a non-solvable problem for 3 reasons:

• First if there was a metric to maximize we could just make a system that tried all permutations and take the one which maximised the metric. Warren Smith attempted to find such a method here but gave up.
• Secondly, PR has historically been about representing parties fairly not representing people fairly. Even if you came up with a good metric people would fight you on it.
• Lastly, there are theories for the party list case what show that you cant have it all. For example the Balinski–Young theorem. Winner set stability is likely the best definition of PR but it does not always have a solution. There may literally be no answer.

. I could be interested in contributing. Would that look like more simulations or trying to axiomatically characterize these methods or both?

Honestly, since it would be all volunteer it up to you. The mandate last time was to come up with a PR system for Equal Vote to endorse. We ended up with Allocated Score but some of the reasons for that are not 100% proven. Any evidence towards the goal of justifying what the best system is would be great. If you are not a coder or a mathematician there is still lots to do. I would love somebody to write up some of the results for publication.

Simulations can be great tools but one thing I've found is that they frequently have so many tuneable parameters that just by changing a few numbers you can benefit one voting rule or another...

Agreed. There are ways around that but in the end simulations never represent reality. Actual mathematical proofs are better but tend to lack applicability.

Anyway, if you are interested write to Sara (sara@equal.vote) and I(keith@equal.vote).

@rob

I am pretty sure it is already independent of EqualVote so it makes no sense to say they control it. I was on the board to help it get set up and pushed for this. Unless things have changed the forum is self led democratically with bylaws and all the proper things in place. I think you are confusing "being led by EqualVote" with "the board sharing several people with EqualVote". The community of people who actually do stuff is quite small. Sara set up the up a lot of the process for this to happen and is the best equipped person in the space to do it.

Do you have an issue with people from EqualVote spending their time on this? Are you on the board? Perhaps you could propose a regulation that no more than 50% of the EqualVote board is on the board of another organization. I am not sure who is on the board now so I do not know if that is currently violated but if there is concern that the forum's board lacks impartiality then something like that would make sense.

You say "considering that we are not even listed on their web site" but I went to the website and found it under "resources" in like 30 seconds.

Another complaint is that a board member is non-responsive. There is likely a requirement for them to participate in board-meetings to keep their status. If you think their should be a requirement for board member to respond on the forum in a timely manner that seems reasonable. Join the board and make a motion for something like that.

If you do not want the money for the forum to come from EqualVote I am sure nobody would object to you paying the bills.

It seems that you want to make changes. Great. Propose them to the board. Or better yet, join the board. If you want to run the forum then run for the president (or whatever the title is) of the board. Sara set all this up so there is a very high standard for the procedure to do this. Just like there is for making the changes to the policy I listed above.

You suggest not having meetings. That never works. Discussions on the details are great to have outside of the meetings but to finalize and do stuff democratically requires some formality.

@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.

Hi @marylander,

In a chat with @Andy-Dienes the other day we came up with a new idea which is somewhat like what sequentially Shrinking Quotas does. There are are least two ways to implement it but the way I like best is as follows:

• It is the same as SSS except if there is a shortfall in reaching a quota to spend

• In that case you ADD some amount of "Ballot Weight" such that the "weighted Ballot" when summed for the winner is exactly a quota

It is doing the same thing as SSQ except that instead of changing the quota size to achieve the goal it it changes every bodies amount of ballot to spend. This gives voting power to those who will elect a candidate in subsequent steps but also to those who are already exhausted. Voters can come back from exhaustion. It gives the same result as SSS in most cases. I can give code if you would like.

I think it is actually doing what the true intent of SSS is better than SSS. That intent is to elect a utilitarian winner then adjust every bodies ballot weight "fairly". I tried to formalized "Fairly" with the concept of Vote Unitarity but I think I originally missed something. I think it is important to only subtract away the amount of influence they used to elect the winner. In the case of surplus the amount is reduced proportionally to that influence. In the case of shortfall I had thought it was fair to just take it all since that was the amount and no other group was going to put up that much for another candidate. However, This short-changes the prior winner and people with overlapping preferences. Since in the case of a shortfall I am effectively giving them ballot weight I need to give that amount to others.

Do you have thoughts on this idea? I can add code of you want.

@jack-waugh This appears to be the Venetian system
https://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html

I would make the same suggestion. Add this example to the score voting page.
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Score_voting

A common tactic of the rank voting supporters is to say that cardinal system are not used anywhere.

@Marylander Modern cardinal multiwinner methods. I do not think he has ever looked into even the older ones like RRV. Otherwise why does he never mention them?

Here is another good article

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

@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.

@rob

I am pretty sure it is already independent of EqualVote so it makes no sense to say they control it. I was on the board to help it get set up and pushed for this. Unless things have changed the forum is self led democratically with bylaws and all the proper things in place. I think you are confusing "being led by EqualVote" with "the board sharing several people with EqualVote". The community of people who actually do stuff is quite small. Sara set up the up a lot of the process for this to happen and is the best equipped person in the space to do it.

Do you have an issue with people from EqualVote spending their time on this? Are you on the board? Perhaps you could propose a regulation that no more than 50% of the EqualVote board is on the board of another organization. I am not sure who is on the board now so I do not know if that is currently violated but if there is concern that the forum's board lacks impartiality then something like that would make sense.

You say "considering that we are not even listed on their web site" but I went to the website and found it under "resources" in like 30 seconds.

Another complaint is that a board member is non-responsive. There is likely a requirement for them to participate in board-meetings to keep their status. If you think their should be a requirement for board member to respond on the forum in a timely manner that seems reasonable. Join the board and make a motion for something like that.

If you do not want the money for the forum to come from EqualVote I am sure nobody would object to you paying the bills.

It seems that you want to make changes. Great. Propose them to the board. Or better yet, join the board. If you want to run the forum then run for the president (or whatever the title is) of the board. Sara set all this up so there is a very high standard for the procedure to do this. Just like there is for making the changes to the policy I listed above.

You suggest not having meetings. That never works. Discussions on the details are great to have outside of the meetings but to finalize and do stuff democratically requires some formality.

I agree with @Sass and @SaraWolk on this. So I will not reiterate their comments.

I think this forum is needed. When the CES shut down their forum I was one of the people who pushed for this to be created. I also pushed for it to not be run by Equal Vote. I wanted it to be more like electowiki.org. Independent of any of the think tanks or lobby groups. I want EqualVote to push people to discuss on the forum but I do not want it to be though of as EqualVote's forum. I think it is moving in that direction and that makes me happy.

I think we just need it to grow. I am happy to let Rob take over the leadership of the forum. However, I do have one condition. He has to stop bashing EqualVote. Again I would point to EqualVotes relationship with electowiki.org. The Rob (@robla) who runs that has a great relationship with EqualVote and there is a large overlap between the contributors to both organizations. Having a Rob (@rob ) running this would be great. EqualVote is a coalition of organizations and people with a shared goal. A forum is a needed part of this coalition. I do not like Reddit so I don't post there almost ever. I would rather people come to this forum.

Does anybody want to go here today to tell them that partisan voting and ranking is not going to lower polarization?

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1CuGeJwbQN2ozR3EnzM2eg

@andy-dienes Awesome. Pandas definitely can make things concise if done right. There are lots of functions.

@andy-dienes said in Threshold MES:

Added a Julia implementation to the electowiki page. If people want it in Python I can translate.

My preference is python with heavy use of the pandas library. This should help it be short an clean. Or at leas shorter than what you have there. We do not really want production code but a very precise definition.

@andy-dienes OK that is what I would have expected. I think this is now my second favourite system (second to SSS but we do not need to side-track). It meets the basic criteria I look for

• It is simple enough to be explained in a referendum to laypeople
• It has an underlying ethos which makes sense. It is not the linear utilities like SSS but it is reasonable and consistent.
• It gives a high level of proportionality
• It gives good voter expression (ie cardinal ballots)

Unless there is a large flaw I am missing (like nonmonotonicity) I think you should run it past experts who are not on here (ie Piotr and Jameson) to see if they have comments.

It is quite similar to Sequential Monroe Voting so I would take a good look at that. The two finalists in the last Committee on voting methods was this and SSS. Allocated score was sort of reinvented as a compromise between the two.

Possible names for this system

• Threshold Allocation Voting
• Proportional Threshold Selection
• Something else with the words Proportional, Threshold, Allocation, Justified.

OK good. It does not seem to have that issue. Thanks for humouring me, I could not quite remember the reason for not wanting to order by original score

@andy-dienes said in Threshold MES:

BBBAB

I would think this is the better result but whatever. To explore this I find the following example which I often refer to illustrative.

@keith-edmonds said in Rule X extended to score ballots:

Consider this 5 winner example with clones for each candidate
Red: 61% vote A:5, B:3, C:0
Blue: 39% vote A:0, B:3, C:5

RRV Gives ['A1', 'C1', 'A2', 'B1', 'B2']
MES Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'B1']
SSS Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'B2', 'B3', 'B4']
Allocated score Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'A2', 'B2', 'A3']
STV Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'C2']

What does your new system give?

@andy-dienes I understand that it is an allocation method so it is all or nothing unless on the split point. I also understand that you want to charge them all the same cost when it is on a split point.

I was thinking that a voter with a ballot weight 0.4 will contribute that 0.4 weight to all candidates they score a 5, BUT the 5 would be sequenced as 2. This means a person who scored the same candidate 3 would be taken first. There is a strategic issue around this but I don't recall the details. We encountered it when designing Allocated score. I suggest you look into the issue. It is linked on electowiki here but the link is broken since the CES forum has been taken down.

@andy-dienes said in Threshold MES:

The disadvantage would be that it respects linear / additive utility much less; for example it will not necessarily choose the score winner (although in practice probably will) and the distribution of utility (again, assuming it is linearly additive over sets) is not as proportional as in regular MES.

Does the system lower the threshold in integer increments? In later rounds the score could be a fraction.

I do like this system a lot and it is simple enough to be viable. It reminds me a bit of Sequential Monroe. I do not think Threshold MES is really the best name.

@andy-dienes I like this system. Is there a clear disadvantage to regular MES? There is a pretty clear simplicity advantage.

Please correct me if either of the following is wrong

• The subtracted voting power is done as "scaling" to the rest of the ballot
• The threshold will always decrease as sub sequent winners are elected.