Let me start with a couple of premises/assertions.

1. Infighting within the voting reform community stands in the way of wider adoption of alternative voting.

2. If FairVote accepted a Condorcet-compliant version of Ranked Choice as an option, they would make a lot faster progress in replacing “Choose-one” voting, because they would eliminate a large amount of resistance from the voting reform community, without bothering RCV advocates in the least.

Most people agree that if a candidate would beat every other candidate if they ran against them one-on-one, that candidate should be elected. Some people think this should outweigh everything else, while some don’t.

FairVote has a very odd, and seemingly contradictory, position on all of this. My own reaction to their position is: “is that SERIOUSLY the hill you want to die on?” It really makes no sense at all that they are so uncompromising on this issue that would make a trivially tiny difference in actual outcomes of elections (and therefore campaign strategies), but would make a huge difference in reducing the number of people out there arguing against IRV rather than more productively directing their energy against Choose-one.

First, let’s clarify a couple things. When I say “IRV”, I mean the current ranked-ballot system that FairVote advocates, which is also known as Hare. You can call it RCV-Hare. In many contexts, “Ranked Choice” or “RCV” simply refer to his method, but here we have to be careful because Ranked Choice can apply to various Condorcet methods with ranked ballots.

Another method, "Bottom Two runoff" is very similar to Hare in almost all ways. Being a ranked ballot system, it could easily be referred to as Ranked Choice (or even IRV, for that matter.... but here let's assume IRV specifically refers to the Hare version). Bottom Two just has a minor tweak making it Condorcet compliant. FairVote could offer it as an option, and I’d predict it would meet with near zero resistance from outside their organization.

FairVote, though, has refused to do this, and they have been entirely contradictory regarding their reasons. They say, over and over on their site, that IRV is good because it almost always elects the Condorcet candidate (339 out of 340 elections). They say, over and over on their site, that IRV is good because it reduces polarization.

But then, when asked why they aren’t ok with Bottom two runoff, they say “IRV rewards those w/ strong 1st choice support. Bottom-2 rewards those who avoid polarizing stances. We like IRV since it encourages real stances, not just campaigning to avoid the bottom”

Let’s break this down, and show just how contradictory they are.

“IRV rewards those w/ strong 1st choice support.”

Isn’t that precisely what Choose-one, the main system they are against, does? So they are basically saying, “Rewarding first choice is the cause of all problems, and our system fixes those problems. But it still rewards first choice, and that’s good.” What?

“Bottom-2 rewards those who avoid polarizing stances.”

Isn’t that just another way of saying that Bottom-two runoff doesn’t encourage polarization? And yet their site is chock full of arguments that polarization is a bad thing, and IRV reduces polarization. So, again.... what?

“We like IRV since it encourages real stances”

I’m not really sure what qualifies as a “real stance”. Do they mean an extreme stance? A polarized stance? A one-sided stance that appeals to some faction while angering the others? One that fails to find the nuance, fails to find a middle ground?

They really need to clarify this. I have a hard time seeing how they can clarify the meaning of "real stance," without just saying that polarization is a positive (despite all the places they say that polarization is a negative).

To me this sounds like the exact opposite of what they say is positive in just about every other page of their web site.

“not just campaigning to avoid the bottom”

“Just” campaigning to avoid the bottom? “Just”? Are they really suggesting that by changing the method to bottom-2, which would have only changed the outcome in 1 out of 440 elections, that it will change campaign strategy that much, so that candidates will now have a sole priority that is completely different from what it would be with the other method? That's pretty extreme..

The logic behind what they are saying is utterly ridiculous. FairVote is well aware that the one RCV election that didn’t elect the Condorcet winner (Burlington 2009) is the one that has produced by far the most criticism for RCV. While I am fully of the opinion that that election was a very close race, and it wasn’t THAT big an error in the grand scheme of things…. I can’t see any reasonable argument that it picked the “right” winner.

The most charitable interpretation of what the are saying is, we want to reduce the polarization and "favor first choice only" attributes of Choose-one, but EVER SO SLIGHTLY less than we could. Because .... uhhh.... just because.

Finally, the overall irony: FairVote says that RCV encourages compromise, nuance, and give-and-take. Accepting Bottom-Two runoff as a reasonable option would be a perfect way to practice what they preach.

Here are some articles where FairVote argues FOR Condorcet and/or AGAINST polarization:

https://www.fairvote.org/want_to_fix_our_polarized_politics_fix_how_we_vote

https://www.fairvote.org/polarization_key_facts

https://www.fairvote.org/report_finds_lack_of_competition_increased_polarization_in_congressional_elections

https://www.fairvote.org/polarization_under_rcv_in_cambridge

https://www.fairvote.org/every_rcv_election_in_the_bay_area_so_far_has_produced_condorcet_winners

If it was up to me, if you go to the main domain page, it would route you to the recent topics page, and on that page (and all the forum pages) there would be links to other parts of the forum as well as to such things as the archives page.

This would probably make it a lot more googlable as well as just making it easier on new visitors. The intro page is not inviting, and the page you get to when you click through to the forums is even less so.

Now that the forum has been running for a while and is stable (good job, @Jack-Waugh ) we should be putting some effort into design / user experience and making it more search engine friendly.

There's a whole ton of other things we could be doing (unlike reddit's EndFPTP and election method email list, we have a lot of capabilities neither of them have), but this design/ux stuff is pretty critical if we want more activity (and therefore have any impact whatsoever beyond amusing ourselves talking about stuff).

@toby-pereira said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

Does anyone call it choose-one outside of voting geekery?

I don't know if the general public has a well-known name for FPTP/plurality/choose-one ... even "first past the post" seems to be restricted to voting geekery. Honestly, I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting". Or maybe "regular voting" or "normal voting."

But I know that "choose one" seems to be instantly understood without explanation (especially in contrast with ranked choice, which most people have heard of). I consider it a descriptive term rather than a name per se, similar to "ranked choice".

If I say "first past the post" they have no idea what I am talking about, and it always feels awkward that I then have to say "it just means first to cross the finish line, as in horse racing, but don't bother trying to think about how that metaphor applies, because I haven't figured that out myself, but that is just what people call it."

It always seems a distracting side conversation that is avoided if you just say "choose-one voting, which is the common system where you just pick a single candidate and the one with the most votes wins." Nobody stops to asks for an explanation--- "choose one" does the trick of getting the point across.

@cfrank said in We should probably have a status update at some point:

The tabulation method cannot be centrally controlled as long as the votes are public. The only thing I want the council to possibly do is make an effort to verify, organize and present the results. We do definitely want a way to organize and separately analyze different groups of ballots.

I hear ya, I'd just hope that could all happen transparently in the forum threads. Any results I posted would link to something like this, where people can paste in ballots, analyze the code, fork the code, etc, so any forum user could check my work (and if they wantm retabulate them in different methods or filtering voters by origin, etc). https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/ExKZVjM

I mean, I don't care if council members want to come in and verify them, but I honestly doubt they'd want to do it as anything other than regular forum participants. This stuff just seems to lend itself to forums

I could see this leading to something more official.... built in widgets and visualizers, pinned threads, permanent pages, etc, and in that case it makes some sense for the council to be able to approve things, but let's just see how this goes first.

Hopefully if the council does meet soon, they can concentrate on the issues such as entry point, categories/tags, etc... changes that @Jack-Waugh will need to make and I think he wants others to make the decisions before doing so.

@cfrank Note that one definition of "Act of Congress" is:

(idiomatic, US, chiefly colloquial) Authorization that is extremely difficult to get, especially in a timely fashion.
Does it take an act of Congress just to get a stop sign on a corner?

But yeah, PR is fine as long as it isn't party-list based, which really rubs me the wrong way. I like more general solutions. One thing I like about about single winner is you can learn about it and use it for voting for all kinds of things that aren't political.

Most of the stuff that talks about PR comes off to me as people are grasping at straws to use black-and-white logic to describe things that intrinsically lie on a spectrum. Like, you don't have "representation" unless "your party" has a member in there. To someone who considers themselves an independent, that simply doesn't compute.

@andy-dienes I agree, but I just go to the "recent" link at top, which is the little clock. It allows me to completely ignore categories.

I would prefer that be the default page, which would especially make it friendlier for newcomers.

Narrowing the categories down to the ones you suggest would be a big improvement though.

@sass Yes that gets to the point quickly. I like.

This seems similar in spirit to the one I was proposing recently. The main difference is that mine used cardinal ballots (intended to be identical to STAR ballots, such as if the STAR people might want to offer a Condorcet version of STAR). But otherwise it was like yours in that it ran pairwise matchups first, and if there was a tie, fell back on the simplest way to resolve it.

So your single sentence could change one word and describe mine:

Among the candidates who tie for winning the most head-to-head matchups, elect the candidate with the best average score.

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/130/star-like-method-reverse-star

That said, I think yours makes more sense for pitching it to Yang's crew, since they seem to like ranked ballots.

Maine used ranked choice voting in the last presidential election, the first state to do so:
https://www.themainewire.com/2020/09/maines-high-court-rules-rcv-must-be-used-in-presidential-election/

I'd love to see other states follow suit (whether with ranked choice, approval, or whatever) but I'm concerned that most states wouldn't do it because they are likely to conclude that it is against the interests of the majority of the voters of the state.

I don't know if I have this right, so I am curious if others see a flaw in my logic.

If there are really only two main candidates in the general election, it shouldn't matter if it is FPTP or not. But let's say there is a third candidate that is popular and had wide appeal, drawing voters from each major party candidate. In other words, a candidate that could actually win under a "good" voting system.

The last I remember this happening was Ross Perot. In June before the election, he was the front runner, with 37% favorability compared to 24% for both Bill Clinton or Bush Sr. So a whole lot of people liked Perot most, but ultimately were discouraged from voting for him because they didn't think he'd be a front runner. Instead they strategically voted for either Bush or Clinton.

Perot got 19% of the votes, but of zero electoral votes since those 19% were spread pretty evenly across the country. In some states he came did come in second place, one of them actually being Maine, where he barely edged out Bush.

Now, imagine a state like Maine having RCV in that election. In that case, Perot might well have won Maine's electoral votes, if people ranked their choices sincerely. He would have a lot of first choice votes, but also have a lot more second choice votes than other candidates (since he was seen as more of a centrist). In fact, Perot got more votes than Bush in Maine under FPTP, so I'd say it is extremely likely he would have won under RCV.

But what that would do is result in Maine give their electoral votes to Perot, while the front runners nationwide were Bush and Clinton. Since the majority of Maine voters preferred Clinton to Bush, having RCV would have very likely caused their electoral votes to be wasted, rather than casting them for Maine's preference between the front runners.

Am I missing something here? And if I am right, is there any better way to implement a better voting system in a single state, when the rest of the country is using the old one?

@Marylander said in Sensible Rules for Recall Elections:

However, the simplest solution would be to simply hold another election where the governor and potential replacements are all just treated as candidates, as they would be in an ordinary election.

Agree, although I think it should also require any candidate that replaces the governor to beat the governor by a certain amount. The low threshold for ousting someone who has been elected doesn't make sense. California's system is severely broken, and was a huge expense that was completely unnecessary.

Although, in the end, Newsome and Democrats probably benefitted from it this time around.

@robla I've always considered that voting theory is a "meta-politics" discussion, and discussing plain-old politics in this context (including just declaring yourself to be on one one side or another) is pretty much the same as discussing it at family Thanksgiving dinner. In that, if you aren't 100% sure everyone agrees with your general position, no good can result from bringing it up and a lot of harm can. All it does is divide people who otherwise can be pursuing a common purpose (whether it being hanging out with family and enjoying good food, or helping navigate the world toward better voting systems)

I also don't look at whatever side I tend to vote with as my "team." It's not just that I have a mind of my own (and I really hate being pigeonholed), but if I want to join a "team," it is the anti-team team. I am in firm agreement with George Washington's Farewell Address sentiments, when he expresses his concerns about factionalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington's_Farewell_Address#Political_parties

It's worth reading the address itself, specifically this part, which is pretty freaking prescient:

the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. .... It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington's_Farewell_Address

Maybe I am misinterpreting what you are asking here, but I just don't think this is the place to wear ones politics on their sleeves, and I have always gone out of my way to do the opposite.

On the other hand I have encouraged people to state their preferences as far as voting methods (you'll see mine in my signature), and I think that's useful. I am not shy about my agenda here, which to help reduce the divisiveness in government and the general public, by eliminating choose-one voting. My strategy is to promote Condorcet-compliant methods, while acknowledging that RCV-Hare is a big step in the right direction, even if it doesn't get us quite as far as Condorcet methods do. I also acknowledge that other methods such as STAR and Approval are much better than choose-one, and while I won't bash them, I am concerned that they don't seem likely to make a lot of inroads.

@andy-dienes said in Are Equal-ranking Condorcet Systems susceptible to Duverger’s law?:

Yes, in the case of Alabama, voters are incredibly polarized across racial lines and we should almost certainly expect to see a Black coalition.

When I lived in Alabama, I was very put off by casual racism I ran into, and racism in general, and that was reflected in the way I voted. But I'm white, and there are a whole lot of things that affected my vote beyond that. So I don't think I identify with a "Black coalition". I want to express my view on the issues involved by voting for candidates that reflected my progressive views on racial issues, but I don't feel comfortable with having a choice between being a "Black coalition" voter and something else. So yeah that idea doesn't sit so well. Ranking candidates, where voters can take into account all the issues that matter to them and prioritize them, works much better for factoring in the views of many voters who are not necessarily Black but are progressive regarding racial issue.

@andy-dienes said:

I also wish you would not equate PR with party-list PR, because while I do think party-list PR is fine, there are plenty of PR schemes which do not require parties.

Yeah well my argument is mostly against party-list PR, I've tried to make that clear. That said, I don't quite understand what is "proportional" about PR if it doesn't refer to parties -- or at least distinct, hard-edged clusters. Can that be expressed in a simple sentence? (rather than a link to a long article where it isn't clear what part is relevant)

A median-seeking system that tends to elect candidates that are centrist is not really proportional per se, but it does have the effect of giving everyone equal pull. (I refer back to the "voting for a temperature by selecting the median preference" example... the system is fair and reasonable, but the word "proportional" doesn't apply because it doesn't first subdivide people into discrete groups)

I like systems that reduce parties and partisanship, by reducing the strategic need for them. Simply making it so there are more viable parties, to me, seems to solve mostly the same thing, but does so in a less elegant way that reduces the "accuracy," for lack of a better word. (by virtue of pre-quantizing along boundaries that can be arbitrary).

And since it doesn't apply to a whole lot of offices that are single winner by nature, it dilutes the message of the voting reform community and distracts.

But going back to non-party-list PR. Most of the justifications for even that kind of PR, still seem to assume parties in their arguments. When they suggest that some voter is in the "minority" that doesn't make sense unless you have subdivided people into groups. I assume the thinking is that that voter happens to most closely align with a party that is in the minority. But that is highly misleading because it has as much to do with where the boundaries of party are, as with how much the voter is an outlier compared to other voters.

And I still don't understand why you think a good ranked system is subject Duverger's law. To me Duverger's law is based on vote splitting effect of choose-one voting, not by whether or not it is single winner.

In the office thermostat example, a method that selects the median is not going to incentivize voters to organize into a cold-liking party and warm-liking party, creating a no-man's land in the middle. Nor would a Condorcet method. Choose-one certainly would, though.

@andy-dienes said:

Exactly! Yes yes yes. Everybody is in tons of minority groups---why not let people choose which of these minority affiliations matter most to them, rather than artificially slicing along geographic lines?

I'm not against getting rid of slicing along geographic lines (if possible....but I don't see how that is realistic with US government any time soon). But I don't see the need to re-slice them into other groups. I'd rather stop slicing people. Slicing is dividing. Dividing is divisive. I am against divisiveness.

Anything that slices people based on "what matters most to them" is probably going to mean no one in the middle. If I am a centrist, if I like everyone to get along, if I prefer less negativity, if I see things with nuance.... who represents me? There is very little incentive to create a middle ground party. Even if lots of people actually are in the middle ground.

@andy-dienes said:

In your thermostat example, the median of [30, 31, 32, 70, 70, 70, 70, 70, 90, 91, 91, 92, 92, 93, 94] is 70, but the median of the medians of [30, 90, 91], [31, 91, 92], [32, 92, 93], [70, 70, 70], [70, 70, 94] is 90.

That actually seems like you are trying to illustrate the exact reason why I don't like pre-clustering people into parties. Such clustering can have a very similar sort of distortion of the people's will.

If you are suggesting that single winner districts with Condorcet methods would lead to Gerrymandering, I'm not entirely sure how that sort of scenario would play out. Like how did it get broken up into groups such that it favored the hot-temperature liking voters?

Gerrymandering, by my understanding, primarily results from a two-party legislature that uses binary votes within it (such as to approve or disapprove the district lines). Therefore whichever party has more than 50%, gets to draw the lines. None of that is the case with Condorcet methods. Gerrymandering requires hard-edged parties, and is most significant when there are exactly two. The more you have the ability to elect middle ground candidates and independents, the less you should have to worry about Gerrymandering.

What you've shown is an electorate with three people who like intensely cold temperatures, five people who like a middle temperature (notably, with zero variation among them), and seven people who like extremely hot temperatures. It seems like you are trying to put people into clearly-defined parties, in a situation where it is very unlikely such extreme divisions would occur naturally.

Honestly, given that set of voters, 90 isn't all that bad a choice. 70 may sound like a nice middle ground, but it isn't according to your data. If just one 70 voter drops out, the median would jump to 80, if another drops out, it jumps to 90. Median obviously fails to give a meaningful result if you have giant gaps right in the middle ground area. Here a reasonable middle ground is more like 78, but median doesn't find that because the data is so extremely (and unnaturally) quantized, with a huge jump right around the 50 percentile.

(If it used interpolated median rather than plain-old median, you'd end up with an answer closer to 78 probably. But I don't think interpolated median would be needed in real world situations with more than a few voters)

In real elections for human candidates, you have an additional effect that doesn't really apply to the temperature thing. That's that candidates that are most electable have more incentive to run. So if the system favors centrists and moderates, more centrists and moderates will be on the ballot. I believe almost all the examples and arguments you have been giving seem to assume that this isn't the case. Not just where no one is voting for any temperature between 70 and 90, but where you seem to be assuming that Black voters simply want at least one Black coalition representative (who will presumably be Black themselves), even if they get a few racists and white supremists elected as well, as opposed to being as happy if all the elected representatives are in a nice middle ground on racial issues.

So the Electoral College is widely disliked, but even if we switched to "popular vote" (which is hard to do because of the requirement of supermajority and the fact that one side would benefit more than the other), we'd still be stuck with choose-one and all the downsides of that.

Unfortunately, as long as there is an electoral college, it seems near impossible to switch to something that gives the advantages of RCV or (better yet) Condorcet.

So maybe there is way to get better results with a change that would be more likely to get wide enough approval, as well as directly addressing the biggest problem: the polarizing effect of choose-one voting.

So here's my idea of the day. What if the Electoral College remained, but it was changed such that each elector submitted a ranked ballot? Then, a reasonable method was used to determine the winner based on those 538 ranked ballots.

This would mean that each state could implement ranked ballots for actual voters that are then tabulated into a "overall ranking", which is then submitted by the electors.

But here's the interesting twist: technically they don't have to have their actual voters rank candidates. In states that prefer to continue using choose-one ballots, the ballots submitted by the electors could simply order the candidates based on the total number of votes for each candidate. In addition to the cost savings of not having to change their ballots, this would mean they'd still have precinct summability, and the voters have no additional burden over what they have today.

Over time, I'd expect that most states would go ahead and implement ranked ballots (for voters, as opposed to electors). It's worth considering what the advantage of doing so is.... it might be less than you'd think.

Notice that this would still give small population states the advantage they have today…. Wyoming would still have more voting power per capita than California. That’s as it was originally designed, and while I don’t necessarily agree with it, it is what it is. (i.e. a different issue) But the point is that we can theoretically get the benefits of a ranked electoral system without also having to fight a completely separate battle at the same time.

I’m curious how this would change the dynamic of elections if implemented. I’m also curious who would tend to resist this due to it disadvantaging them? (And of course, has anyone ever suggested this?)

@cfrank said in Defining "degree of representation" in multi-winner elections:

I think cognitive diversity is a safe way to “turn down heat” in government

Can't understand how having a wider ideological spread is going to turn down the heat compared to having a bunch of moderates.

@cfrank said :

simultaneously offering routes for important or novel issues to be addressed

Only to be shot down (or at least watered down to the point of uselessness) by those on the other side.

And just because you have moderates doesn't mean you don't have novel ideas. I think that's an erroneous assumption. I do think novel ideas have a much better chance when you have people working together rather against each other.

@cfrank said:

In my opinion, agreements between individuals of dissimilar ideologies are often more substantial and less controversial than those between like-minded individuals.

Even when those "like-minded individuals" are like-minded by virtue of them tending to all be moderates/centrists?

I'm having a hard time seeing that. At least on the "less controversial".... centrists aren't known for being particularly controversial. It's one thing if they are like minded if they are in a social-media bubble or the like. This is the opposite of this. You are actually electing the least controversial candidates.

What I'm concerned about is situations, similar to today, where one party gets their way, then different people get elected, the balance shifts, and they undo what they did last time around. This seems far less likely when you have a bunch of moderates.

Maybe you could give an example of being "more substantial" while also being "less controversial." I'd say that typically, being substantial means it is a large change, and large changes are more likely to be controversial than small/evolutionary changes.

Anyway the one thing I can't figure out is how you advocate for consensualism while disliking like-mindedness. (or are you backing off on the consensus thing?) Because that's exactly what I'm advocating, electing consensus candidates.

@andy-dienes I spent many years in Alabama. Lotta racism there. But there's actually a good number of counties that are majority Black.

But yes I think Condorcet would help just as much or more than party-based PR. Extremists (including racist extremists... Mo Brooks comes to mind) would be less likely to be elected to office. The 27% of the voters that are Black would be able to "move the needle" in their direction, favoring candidates that are less racist and more likely to make improvements on issues such as racial equity and inclusion.

I think with party list PR, you'd be more likely to have both racists, as well as people far on the other side, in the legislature. I'd rather have people on neither extreme. The more polarized the legislature (even if polarized in more than two directions), the more anger and ugliness, and the less progress gets made. And less progress is generally a bad thing for underprivileged groups.

One other thing I should say. Black people are an obvious distinction, because in most cases, you are either Black or not Black, and it is seen as an important part of your identity. Under a PR system, would there be a "Black party"? If not, what good does PR do in this case?

But there are so many ways to divide people. When I was in Alabama, I was employed as a software developer. Software developers are also a minority. I was a dog owner. Dog owners are also a minority. I was over 6 feet tall. People over 6 feet tall are also a minority. Everybody is in tons of minority groups. I'm not trying to be difficult here, I'm just saying, dividing people into discrete groups and then trying to deal with it based on group isn't always helpful. Treating people as individuals, and giving everyone equal pull (as Condorcet methods tend to do) is.

So yeah, I'm curious why you wouldn't think Condorcet methods would help.

@cfrank said in Defining "degree of representation" in multi-winner elections:

@rob I think certainly X achieves better representation in the second case. His interests are almost exactly embodied by one of the three candidates.

So is it fair to say that, by your definition of representation, you only consider "positive representation"? You don't factor in the "negative representation" effects of candidates E and F, which are also elected and are ideologically very distant from voter X? That is, your only consideration for whether a voter has representation is how many people on their side are elected, while how many people on the opposite side are ignored.

I mean, that's fair, if that's how you define representation. (I resist defining it myself because I don't tend to use the word in this context) So you can say "X has more representation in scenario 2, but also has more opposition." Since both scenarios average out to roughly the same ideological position, my own view is that it isn't clear whether X is better off or worse off with either scenario.

The term "cognitive diversity" sounds like a positive. But so does its opposite, "like-mindedness." I know you are a fan of the concept of consensus.... I think "like-mindedness" and "consensus" are related concepts.

If I was a shareholder in a corporation, and we voted for officers of the company, I know I would choose scenario 1. I think like-mindedness means they can execute more effectively and probably increase profits (or whatever goal the corporation had, such as if it is a non-profit). This is why companies under a benevolent dictator often do well, such as Apple under Steve Jobs. (not that I would have wanted to work under him!)

I also suspect scenario 1 would be particularly effective for nations dealing with an adversary. I think Putin is currently exploiting the fact that the US is far from "like minded."

My highest priority is to "turn down the heat" in government, so you'd probably understand why I prefer scenario 1.

Regardless, assuming you agree with my characterization above, we made some progress here by clarifying the term "representation" as you use it.

I thought it might be appropriate to break this out into a separate thread from https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/295/are-equal-ranking-condorcet-systems-susceptible-to-duverger-s-law, where this is straying off topic.

Below is a graphic I made to illustrate a point, showing voters and candidates in a multi-winner election. This is based on my voting simulator, where ideology-space is shown in two dimensions. (the crosshairs represent the median, the labeled dots represent candidates, the small dots represent voters)

In one scenario, A, B and C are elected to the 3 positions within a legislature. They are all close to the median, and would likely be the top 3 winners in a ranked choice election (preferably Condorcet compliant).

In another scenario, D, E and F are elected, as they might be in a party-list PR election. Each of these candidates are in a party, and the three parties are not particularly close to the median since parties don't tend to be right in the center.

Voter X is very much aligned with the ideological position of D and D's party, while quite distant from the other two candidates and parties.

The question is, in which scenario is voter X "more represented"? (and by extension, in which scenario is X better off?)

In the first scenario (which elects A, B and C), voter X is approximately equally represented by all three elected candidates. X neither loves nor hates any of the three.

In the second (electing D, E and F), X likes D a lot, but dislikes E and F.

@andy-dienes said in Are Equal-ranking Condorcet Systems susceptible to Duverger’s law?:

Splitting seats up by geography is one way to guarantee some amount of diversity, but doesn't it seem to you like sort of an arbitrary axis along which to slice people? Why not split seats up by income level? Or gender? PR lets voters choose which of these axes they lie on matter most to them.

One reason to split them by geography is simply that it is already done currently in most existing legislative bodies in the US. So my argument there isn't that geography is the best way, but simply that it already is in place and is therefore hard to change. I think putting a ranked method in place is a lower hanging fruit, because it requires the least change. Also, it applies to offices such as President, governors, mayors, and a whole ton of local offices.

My argument is that a good, median seeking method (Condorcet compliant, blah blah blah) would solve the problem just as well as using PR. (and probably better, especially if you are talking about party-list PR) It has the advantage in that it works fine when the numbers are small enough that you can't really get things proportional (e.g. Wyoming only has one representative in Congress, so what can you do there? What about senators where there are two per state? )

I guess the idea is that if you have 3 offices to fill, and the voters are an equal balance of liberal, conservative, and libertarian, it is just as good to elect 3 centrists as it is to elect one of each ideology. A liberal voter, instead of being represented by one of the three office holders, could be said to be represented by 1/3 of each office holder.

And of course, if there aren't a nice even division of positions that matches the number of offices, this system still works. And of course all the candidates aren't just going to be exactly in the center and clones of one another, but at the extreme, yeah.... centrist candidates that represent everyone.

And if it was like that, I don't see a lot of gerrymandering. Because if it is centrist candidates getting elected, what is the point?

And sure, you can do that with multi winner or you can do it with single winner (typically by district). I see advantages to both. But what I don't want to do is require there be parties written into the legislation. Someone can be liberal without being in the Democratic party. The point is that the parties should have less, rather than more, importance in elections that they do today. Third parties are great, but so are independents. And parties don't work very well when they try to be both national and local. (for instance here in SF the republican party doesn't really exist in local politics)

@toby-pereira I mostly agree, but don't feel strongly either way about splitting single and multi winner.

Honestly, for me it isn't an issue if we just have the landing page be "recent discussions." That's where I go automatically, but for new users it is where they should go to see the activity.

@cfrank said in Are Equal-ranking Condorcet Systems susceptible to Duverger’s law?:

Because such a procedure is reasonable, then if any such procedure is agreed upon, problems relating to adequacy of representation are effectively solved.

No I don't think that is an accurate way of stating my view. It's not whether the procedure is agreed upon, anyway. I think some methods are better than others. I hate to keep saying "Condorcet compliance" because as we all know that isn't perfect itself (although it is pretty good). But we want something that minimizes vote splitting.

I also don't like using the term "adequacy of representation" because I still don't feel that "representation" is fully defined in a generalizable way. We could be voting directly on an issue. Or if we are voting for, say, president or mayor, which aren't "representatives" per se. (I might be more interested in their competence and charisma than whether they are advocating for particular issues that I care about)

I guess I just prefer we stop using the word "representation" as if it is a measurable thing, at least until is it defined in crystal clear terms that aren't dependent on such things as the existence of parties. I think there are better ways of describing what we are after.

@cfrank said:

A simple poll on the quality of representation voters receive from government officials on something like a “very poor,” “poor,” “fair,” “good,” “excellent” scale could formalize those feelings in any case.

I'd think that is too subjective and too much slop. Some people are bad compromisers, and will rate the results as poor if they didn't get exactly their way. And if the poll has any influence on how things play out, you have incentivized them be "squeaky wheels" and exaggerate their dissatisfaction.

I think a better way of measuring how well a system works is trying to measure whether each voter has equal "pull." This is why I would tend to use a "voting for a number" (or "voting for an N-dimensional point) scenario as a benchmark, where each voter is assumed to have a single-peaked preference. A "median seeking" method is what I'd want. If it truly is median seeking, it would be game theoretically stable and meet my idea of "fair." If that means "adequate representation" (in a case where you are electing representatives), ok, but I find the terminology both vague and not generalized enough.

(and you just aren't going to be able to measure this stuff meaningfully unless you try to minimize extraneous variables and make it a "pure" situation. Think of it like an engineer testing a car engine on a test bench rather than in a car driving down the road. Voting for numerical or geometrical candidates is always going to lend itself better to analysis)

What I am saying is that, to the best I can see, a median-seeking method would achieve all the important ideals of PR (e.g. all voters get equal say), even in elections where there are no parties involved. You just wouldn't use terms to describe them that refer to parties or that assume that voters and candidates fit into neat little groups.

Regardless, bringing it back to Duverger's law. Let's set aside human candidates for an example, that just complicates and obscures.

Say you've got a club that gets together regularly to see movies, and you vote on the movie. It's easy to see how, under choose-one, you are likely to have "parties" form, starting with people just saying to one another "hey, let's agree to vote on the same sci-fi special-effects extravaganza, so we we aren't stuck watching a lame chick flick". So you end up with the action-movie party and the chick flick party (or whatever, but it should tend to converge on two over time). That's all you need for Duverger's law to kick in.... a system that splits the vote and incentivizes people to defend against it by teaming up.

Do you think that would still happen when ranking the options? Would people bother teaming up? I don't see how it would. The incentive to do so would be vanishingly small, especially if using a method that minimized any spoiler effect / vote splitting (e.g. median seeking / Condorcet compliant methods).

If you think it would still be susceptible to Duverger's law, please explain how you think that would play out.

@andy-dienes I looked at the Wikipedia article, and didn't see the things I discussed above defined.

Specifically, what is meant by "representation"? I would be interested in a definition that is generalizable, such as to situations where voters might have nuanced views on multiple issues. Same with "majority" and "minority". The words as I understand them only apply to very specific scenarios which I would consider unrealistic, such as binary choices.

I do notice that, on electowiki, it says "In the case of non-partisan voting, the definition of proportional representation is undefined". That seems to be getting at what I am trying to say. I take it further, as I find this assumption that parties must exist and be considered a prerequisite to be.... how do I say this? Offensive? Maybe that's too strong. But I don't like it and it doesn't align with my way of looking at group decision making, in the abstract.

Here's the best analogy I can come up with right now. Say I am looking at cars, and want one that is economical to drive and minimally damaging to the environment. And all the terminology used for comparison includes terms like "miles per gallon" and "smog rating" and such. And I keep asking, "why are you assuming it must use gasoline and be internal combustion?" They've basically painted themselves into a corner with their terminology, so they can't even evaluate electric cars -- at least not on the same criteria-- because they've made a bunch of (very limiting) assumptions up front.

That's how I feel about this assumption of parties, and the usage of terms like "representation" and "majority/minority" that only make sense with the assumption of parties (and seemingly with a bunch of other limiting assumptions as well, such as that each voter and each candidate is perfectly aligned/centered within their party).

I see parties (as opposed to special interest groups) as being mostly-unfortunate by-products of some electoral systems, not prerequisites to electoral systems. I'm not saying they must go away entirely or anything like that, but I don't think we should take them as a given, or define concepts around them, which PR seems to do.