Take a look at this video. A City in Utah just voted 5-2 against implementing IRV. Stated reasons, they'd rather have STAR voting and don't want to pass a stepping stone and then change it, and monotonicity.

Here's a discussion at one of the more interesting comments. https://youtu.be/TQbr4KYzxR4?t=11667

@bternarytau I do remember that exchange as you said as well and I was also in a blur with a number of things happening all at once (I submitted that first draft on my way to the airport to get surgery cross country,) so my apologies for not following up as I should have or remembering that we'd left this a loose end.

My memory is still a bit foggy on what exactly we ended up using as the formal definition, since it was almost a year and a half ago, so I'm going to take a closer look at it right now and see what I can do.

I can say that since the definition in the hard printed part of the issue is Mark Frohnmayer's, and the more rigorous definition you'd been working on is in the appendix, which will be hosted online, we should still be able to put in changes and credit or cite you, so please give some thought to what you would like that citation to be exactly and email me at sara@equal.vote to follow up.

Hi everyone,
I'd like to share some information for people who might have missed previous threads or comments, and I'd like to offer a proposal.

For reference:
Key Motions Passed in Council Meetings (all unanimous!):
Motion 1, v2: “To establish an independent organization with the purpose of owning and maintaining the online discussion forum.”
Motion 2 v2: “Move to establish and try to publish an online discussion forum based on the “NodeBB” forum software.”
Motion 3: “To do due diligence and apply best practices to protect and minimize the storage of PII of users, with these responsibilities explicitly delegated to specific responsible individuals trusted by the council/board.”
Motion 4: “Create a tech committee empowered to make non-controversial “technical decisions” on behalf of the group as needed, with the understanding that the council could revisit those decisions later if needed. The committee should consult the council on questions where the decision may be controversial.”
Motion 5: “Order of operations. 1. Pass bylaws. 2. Elect board. 3. Launch website.”
Motion 6: “Adopt categories list”
Motion 7: “Adopt Code of Conduct, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.”
Motion 8: “Motion passed unanimously to coalition with Equal Vote and receive donations and pay expenses through Equal Vote account.”

Resources:
Bylaws: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1obwaF82x5022V_K-gifdv7Why-O5LzqFAiB_d4EwqAw/edit?usp=sharing
Procedure Manual: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TCRbEXuBqY8N1glKf7YHNWMVIWD7blgZQhwomfteigY/edit?usp=sharing
Privacy policy. Ready for review. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QzZp2QAsP60Ti1WWPk29Q8dInGIM2l438rcJDZLd2Ug/edit?usp=sharing
Terms of Service: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AlnP1gvvc986n0iiYYkA0Tc9L33erbxDftM7sX5ypz4/edit?usp=sharing
Code of Conduct: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ExGrryHIFOjSfPiTtHYBRPw7GQY8lRsCfWiWsLEsImc/edit?usp=sharing

Forum Council Members:
Sara Wolk, William "Jack" Waugh, David Hinds, Connor Frankston, Micah Fitch.
Moderators:
Sara Wolk. Connor Frankston, David Hinds, Connor Frankston, Micah Fitch, Gary Litke.
Tech Committee
William Waugh, (Rob Brown was added by Jack and keys have been shared but that has not been officially authorized yet).

Key points: This forum already has a Council that governs it in terms of the big picture decisions. It also has a tech team and moderation team that can work on things and address issues as needed. They are also empowered to make non-controversial decisions without needing to call a Council meeting or jump through unnecessary hoops. The Forum Council can also approve decisions between meetings, as it has done in the past. The main barrier to progress as I see it is that we could use more volunteers to help. If you'd like to volunteer, email us at forum@equal.vote.

I don't think there is any benefit to rehashing our processes or decisions that have already been made with plenty of consideration and lots of input from Council Members (past and current) and with input gathered from Forum participants at large through the forum itself. To date all our votes since the forum launched have been unanimous.

I do think it's very problematic to make consequential or controversial decisions via forum posting. That opens the door to leadership who don't have the time to read all the posts missing a huge decision. Meetings also allow us to bring in perspectives from other spaces where relevant discussion takes place. Voting via forum post would make it next to impossible to ensure that people have read the relevant discussions and have the background needed before they vote. I love the idea about getting feedback from participants and taking polls to inform council decisions, as we have always done, but for bylaw level items, an actual meeting with real face to face discussion protects the longevity and integrity of the forum much better.

For those who don't know me, I've put in a lot of time and effort over the last 2 years to help build an inclusive, robust, and stable forum that will be an asset to our community for years to come. We included everyone in that process start to finish who wanted to contribute. All the work I've put in has been done in a volunteer capacity, (not as part of my job with Equal Vote). I was really excited and proud to have finished our long list of meta level set up tasks (see resource list above) and hope to not spend too much time revisiting them. The more fun work of making the forum better and bigger and discussing voting science is still ahead.

My Proposal for Forum Next Steps:

1. We recruit some new volunteers to our Forum Council, Tech Committee, and Moderation Committee. Each of these requires a different time commitment and skill set so finding the right people for each task is important. Email forum@equal.vote to volunteer.
2. We don't waste time rehashing process and governance level conversations unless there is a specific need to do so.
3. Jack finishes passing the keys for management and billing of the forum to Equal Vote so Equal Vote can pay for the Forum's hosting and URL with the new grant money we recently obtained for software dev. The Forum is still autonomous, this is just a coalition service that we've gotten agreement from both boards on. This ensures that our Forum assets will be protected and will be renewed and paid for and that keys can be passed easily if needed. (Right now it's under Jack's personal account, which is problematic.) This is all in accordance with what was decided already, and allows us to ensure that the council has recourse if any one person goes AWOL or if there is a problem with an individual admin. Everyone is in agreement that the Forum should be and stay autonomous to keep it welcoming for advocates of all types of reforms.
4. We have our next Council Meeting soon. Everyone who would like to attend or volunteer, please put in your availability here.
5. We keep the forum constructive and drama free. We resolve any issues or disputes that might come up (such as Rob's here) by reaching out to each other more directly so we can hopefully avoid stress and hurt feelings or unnecessary escalation. I think that keeping posts like this off the forum itself unless other avenues have been tried and failed will help recruit and retain volunteers and forum participants in general. It will certainly help me be more comfortable inviting new people to join us here.

In order to improve engagement on this forum we should double down on the commitments we've already made to make this a non-toxic space for new people and to keep our current volunteers motivated to complete the action items already on the list.

Check out this post on Reddit.

Comment and discuss. The proposal is to change rule #3 from "Do NOT bash alternatives to FPTP" to "Keep criticisms constructive and keep claims factual".
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/124861h/reconsidering_the_endfptp_rules/

I think that's a bit confusing and redundant. Having replies only show up under the comment they are replying to would be better.

NOTE: This thread all happened when I was in Canada last fall taking care of family business. Upon getting back in September I promptly found out that my household received a no-cause eviction and had to find a place for my whole household to move short notice in the midst of a housing crisis. I've just completed that move, launched a statewide ballot initiative, published a paper, our lawsuit for voter disenfranchisement regarding the Eugene Ballot initiative for 2020 was escalated to federal court, as well as a few personal things as well. Life is not usually this busy, but sometimes it is. While considering updates to the categories list is interesting, I think it might be helpful for Forum users to recognize that people who don't check the forum every day might have more urgent priorities and that that doesn't mean they don't care. I didn't lead the charge to schedule a meeting right then (which requires a fair bit of time to organize and host) because I didn't have time to do so. I put it on the to do list and here we are.

Post: A lot of thought and input from way more people than are here on this thread went into the current categories so I'm hesitant to change them, but am open minded and would support simplifying them somewhat. There are good pros and cons in the thread above. The intention to have them as they are was that the forum can scale to include and welcome other reform advocates beyond voting "theorists". I still see that as very possible and as a personal priority for what I'd like to see in this forum.

We did have consensus that we wanted the "Recent" page to be the default when we launched and I think I tried to do at one point but we didn't figure out how, so we can absolutely do that now.

@jack-waugh Yes. I changed your billing access to Read Only, deleted your card, and added mine and Equal Vote's. The Equal Vote card is the default card now. We can go over the permission settings together when we meet if any changes are needed. I won't make any other changes in the Lindoe.

Here's our email blast about it from Equal Vote. http://mailchi.mp/equal.vote/approval-banned

The takeaway is that backlash against having oversold RCV is indiscriminate and we (voting theorists) need to help stop the spread of misinformation.

@Jack-Waugh @Marylander
Sounds good to me.
Thanks for looking into it. I don't think it's time sensitive or anything, just thought I'd flag it here as a feature request.

Nice to have our categories all sorted out so clearly with a spot for these types of questions.

I haven't had much time to engage here on the forum since we launched, but I've been sending people over and it seems like there are conversations happening!

Looking forward to having more time to invest here soon.

@anniek Interesting proposal! I don't know how this might impact voter behavior. It's likely that most people wouldn't understand the incentives so behavior could be all over the map, or just default to honest. It would be interested to hear back from people after the fact.

Let's say there were 3 seats and the candidates were, A: Great, B: Good, C : Incompetent D : Obnoxious, E: Evil and F: None of the Below.

I would likely score them A:5, B:4, F:3. Hopefully others would agree and we'd only elect the two decent candidates. Worst case scenario others wouldn't agree, Evil would win the 3rd seat, and I would have forfeited my chance to give 1 star to Incompetent or Obnoxious to help prevent Evil from winning.

I will say that for small group elections where good quality candidates can be hard to come by I've seen scenarios come up in real life where a provision like this was needed.

Curious to see what other think.

To speak to Adam's point itself-

Exhausted ballots in RCV are not only "votes of no preference" ie. ballots that intentionally didn't rank any of the RCV finalists, but also:
a) votes that were unable to transfer to a viable alternative because of the order of elimination, and that could have made a difference if their other rankings had been counted.
b) voters who were unable to rank all the candidates due to ballot limitations.

STAR always counts all the ballot data. Every ballot is included in the final round. A vote of No Preference is explicitly a voter who chose to score those candidates equally, and that neutral runoff vote IS counted. No voters will have their votes unable to transfer.

Note: Spoiled/voided ballots are often included in RCV exhausted ballot stats, but are sometimes counted separately. In any case, spoiled ballots in RCV are common. Accidentally spoiling your STAR ballot is much harder to do.

To clarify, the doc shared above, and the image at the top, is Adam's work. It's not not an Equal Vote graphic. The part in color is a crop from one of our scorecard infographics. The other part is from a volunteer's DRAFT graphic she's working on and shared privately asking for feedback. Adam has these two element combined in the doc he created.

@masiarek I expect this wasn't your intent, but taking her draft work that she shared in a private conversation (the STAR Slack is a private group for our volunteers) and then reposting it for critique without context in a public forum (votingtheory.org) is problematic, especially because you've modified the work and collaged it with other graphics in a way she didn't approve.

Thanks for posting here. We can at least add it to the list!

Uploading files in full res would be great, so that if people download and re-share from here our content isn't deteriorating.

@toby-pereira I imagine that this forums users would not be happy with a tool that only allowed Plurality!

My hope is that the code the Equal Vote Software Dev team is working on will be able to be used for that. Right now the beta version is almost done and it currently supports Plurality, Approval, STAR, RCV, Ranked Robin, and STAR-PR. We're working on visual design and word-smithing now.

Here's the Governor's veto letter. It's really good!

Currently it appears to be possible for a user to block an admin or moderator so that they can't see any of their old posts. This persists even after the user has themself been banned from the forum.

It's common for there to be a rule against this on forums where it's possible because it undermines the moderators ability to do their job, but it would be great if it just wasn't possible. I suggest we look into both options.

@toby-pereira I think it's worth having them separate because they create space for those topics intentionally in a way that I hope will help encourage new people who work on those issues to use them.

I think it's really important to separate out new voting methods from vetted ones because discussion of new voting methods often is a lot of unproven opinions, unsubstantiated concerns, and generally a discussion that would be absolutely counterproductive and derailing if people in the advocacy space who think they know more than they do read it.

On the other hand I see the pros of consolidation as well.

As to ideas that we brainstormed for an other reforms type category, Eric had suggested Theory of Change (which I've never heard of before) and someone suggested Other Reforms or something like that. Having two discussion categories: "Electoral Reform Discussion" and "Voting Method Discussion" could work. I don't like the framing of "other xyz" because it makes it sound like this forum is really mostly for voting method reform, which I hope we will grow past.

Another idea entirely would be to combine all of the voting and electoral reform topics, including voting methods, into one big Electoral Reform category. Then we could encourage people to tag posts with things like New Voting Methods, Money in Politics, Districting, Electoral College, Multi-Winner, STAR Voting, and more. I see some benefit to that, but the concern is that tags wouldn't be used or would be used inconsistently, so unless admin put in a lot of work on filing posts it would be a total mess in no time. If we did this (Call it proposal B w/ 5 categories, 6-12 subcategories), here's how the list would look:

• Welcome:
  ** Introduce yourself
  ** Electoral Theory 101
  ** Forum Policy, Announcements, and Resources

• Advocacy and Events

• Electoral Reform Discussion: (with or without subcategories?)

• Meta:
  ** Meta Forum Discussion
  ** Issue Reports and Feature Requests
  ** Council, Mods, and Tech Team (private)

• Watercooler

@mosbrooker said in Can Democracy have an air-tight legal definition?:

OMOV

I assume OMOV is One Man, (Person) One Vote? (Defining your acronyms the first time you use them is always helpful.)

If so, I'm curious if you have heard of the Equality Criterion, which many of us believe is a stricter definition of One Person, One Vote. A few of us just published an article on it which you can read here that attempts to formally define One Person One Vote and build on the Supreme Court Ruling that stated that the "weight and worth of the citizens' votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same."

I'll paste in a quote for discussion, and you can also find a more lay friendly explanation over at the Equal Vote Coalition website here and here.

"We posit that by passing the Equality Criterion, vote-splitting caused by the voting method itself can be eliminated. The Equality Criterion states that for any given vote, there is a possible opposite vote, such that if both were cast, it would not change the outcome of an election.7 The Equality Criterion ensures that if one party had the support of 51% of the voters and ran multiple candidates, and another party had the support of 49% of the electorate and ran only one candidate, the majority faction would always have some way to give all of their candidates full support and thus guarantee a win, even if the front-runners were unknown.

In 1964, Wesberry v. Sanders, (Black, 1964) The U.S. Supreme Court declared that equality of voting—one person, one vote—means that “the weight and worth of the citizens’ votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same.” Passing the Equality Criterion ensures that it’s possible for voters who disagree to cast equally weighted and opposite votes, no matter how many candidates are on their side. Approval, Score, Smith/Minimax, and STAR Voting all pass this basic and ’practicable’ criteria; Plurality and Instant Runoff Voting do not."

@denis-falvey Welcome! Thanks for sharing and discussing your work here!