Sara Wolk is the Executive Director of the Equal Vote Coalition, a non-profit fighting for true equality in the vote itself. Sara is a dedicated community organizer who has been leading the Oregon movement for voting reform since 2016 when she was elected to chair the RCV-Oregon research committee on alternative voting methods. It was the work of this committee which changed her mind. STAR Voting was the only method that delivered on the committee's core goals. With a background in sustainability, design, and music, she is looking forward to building the kind of coalition that can reshape democracy. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
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
I think that's a bit confusing and redundant. Having replies only show up under the comment they are replying to would be better.
@Keith Exactly. And the intent is not only to reduce the need for strategic voting, but to actually incentivize honest voting, and to ensure that the system is fair and equal. This is the key to eliminating an "electability" bias, or status quo glass ceiling. There are a lot of reasons why and it's not just about any one of these reasons in isolation. I see it as a very empowering voting method overall.
For voters who don't like the frontrunners, their vote is still as powerful as a voter who does have a strong candidate on their side. The full repercussions of this are hard to quantify, but this is one reason that I think STAR is the most powerful single winner voting method to break two party domination.
I added a sentence on explicitly opting in to email notifications under section 1. From what I read I think we may need this in there for legal reasons.
"If you create an account on the Website, you are explicitly authorizing the Forum to send you emails regarding forum activity and updates. You may opt out of most email notifications at any time."
@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.
STAR Voting is designed to maximize both utilitarianism and finding majority supported winners where possible. I look at it like a debate between quality and quantity. Both are important. In STAR Voting the scoring round measures quality of support, (how much do the voters like the various candidates. Then, the runoff measures quantity or number of supporters, (between the two front-runners, which do you prefer.)
As for why I believe STAR Voting is more fair and representative compared to Score, of course I have to start with the disclaimer that Score is a very good system, and they get the same winner most of the time, but in Score Voting if I vote honestly and don't give any front-runners a top score, then my vote's impact is less than if I had strategically given my lesser-evil a top score.
Another shortcoming with Score that is addressed by STAR is if some voters fail to use the full scale. Strategically speaking, the best strategy in both methods is always to give your favorite 5 stars, but it's to be expected that some voters will give a mediocre score to a mediocre favorite, especially if they are new to the system. Unless you normalize scores, Score voting gives voters a chance at an equally weighted vote, but doesn't actually guarantee it. Hopefully this will be corrected with voter education and good instructions, but with STAR there's the added failsafe that the runoff is binary. Ultimately your vote is just as powerful as everyone else's.
These voters, voters who are currently marginalized in our current system, should have just as powerful a vote as a voter who does support a frontrunner. Guaranteed. STAR Voting does that. If your favorite can't win, you can give your favorite 5 stars, give your lesser evil 1 star, and that will still ensure that if it comes down to it, your fully weighted vote will help prevent your worst case scenario. That's how STAR Voting prevents tyranny of the Majority. If your lesser-evil is actually substantially better than your worst case scenario you can give them a better score.
As far as I know STAR may be the only method where even if none of the candidates you like can win, your vote can still make a difference and help prevent your worst case scenario.
Great. I updated it as suggested. If Connor and David approve it as well we can call it done and check the Code of Conduct off the list.
Hi everyone. We鈥檙e gearing up for the next board meeting and are still looking for more leadership and moderation help. Please join us if that鈥檚 something you can contribute!
Our doodle poll will close tomorrow, so please chime in soon with your availability. It鈥檚 looking like a Tuesday will probably be the pick. https://doodle.com/poll/9tvtz7kp7fsv5fzn?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link
STAR does not pass FB criterion, so yes, there is a hypothetical scenario possible where giving your favorite less than 5 could be beneficial, but that does not mean that there's a real election scenario where that's actionable or incentivised in real time with a realistic amount of information on voter behavior available.
The mark of an ideal system is to balance competing considerations and incentives to give something that's robust all around. Score in most cases will get the same outcomes, and so I personally don't think that accuracy is the principle to look at to differentiate between them. The biggest difference is in terms of real world advocacy. Score is a dealbreaker because vote weight isn't normalized. We get attacks on STAR regularly that are not true about STAR, but that are about Score.
Strategic voting aside look at this example:
Voter Vicki is a disenfranchised voter who typically doesn't like the frontrunners in her city, which amazingly uses Score voting to elect the mayor. In this race the frontrunners are named Bad and Worse, and there are a few other options as well. She gets her ballot and fills it out honestly like so:
Bad: 1
Worse: 0
Boring: 2
Lame: 3
Obscure: 5
Because Vicki really dislikes both frontrunners, her vote is predictably less powerful than someone who actually does like one of the frontrunners and dislikes the other. Vicki's vote is thus dependably less powerful than other voters and she remains marginalized. In contrast, STAR Voting guarantees Vicki an equal and fully powerful vote for the finalist she prefers.
Sure, some people could argue that since her strength of preference is weaker it's fair that her vote cary less weight, but most would disagree.
PS. Cardinal Baldwin isn't monotonic. The extra rounds and drawn out process make a difference, so they really aren't the same systems. Just similar.
Code of Conduct:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ExGrryHIFOjSfPiTtHYBRPw7GQY8lRsCfWiWsLEsImc/edit?usp=sharing
Adopted February 17th, 2021
Hi Forum Leaders,
Jack recently sent out a doodle poll for a next forum meeting. Unfortunately it looks like it was flagged as spam, (I just unflagged it.) Also, it listed times on pretty short notice. Generally these things take longer than that to allow everyone time to read the email, respond, and then confirm a date. I'm not available any of those times, so I'd like to propose a few new options.
Monday Aug 29th, 9am-7pm pacific
Tuesday Aug 30th, 9am-6pm pacific
Wednesday Aug 31st 9am-4:30pm pacific
Thursday Sept 1st 9am-4:30pm pacific
Friday Sept 2nd 9am-4:30pm pacific
Jack, can you share some more info on what you hope to cover at this meeting or any action items or agenda items we might have? It looks like Marylander had a list of things to check in on and discuss.
"I propose we hold a meeting on the following topics:
- What day-to-day responsibilities have we assigned, and are they currently being filled? If not, do we need to recruit new volunteers?
- What goals had we set for the forum at launch, and have we achieved them?
- What new goals should we have for the forum?
Officially I think we turned 1 year old about a month ago, so it seems like a good time to start planning a meeting like this... In this doc you can suggest things to cover at the meeting.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YMhr1PRCKOAeLn4gZ4Nnqhm0dbCNBdfANrl5KF-ctPA/edit?usp=sharing"
Please share your availability the week of 8/29 to help narrow down a time that works for as many of us as possible. Thanks!
CES leadership does not reply to my emails either, but I hope to talk with Felix again soon and will ask if possible. I'll also ask them if and when they plan to shut it down. Ideally those two tasks would happen at the same time.
@Jack-Waugh
Bad1: 1 star
Bad2: 1 star
Worse1: 0 stars
Worse2: 0 stars
I disagree that the fact that score and STAR don't produce identical results means that one or the other is cheating. Neither is cheating voters. They are both good methods and the they optimize for slightly different things.
Both are valid goals and methods, but there's a real world benefit to narrowing down the list of proposals to help lay people make a good choice. If we promote both loudly (and also list all other good methods we can think of) the considerations would be overwhelming to most and would lead most to get overwhelmed and quit researching, or worse, come to a decision after only considering a one-sided set of considerations.
Take Condorcet for example. Condorcet has largely failed to get adopted anywhere because of lack of consensus around the best version, despite that all versions are quite a bit better than most methods in use. If Condorcet advocates had come together around a good well rounded proposal and simplified their pitch a long time ago it would likely be the dominant RCV method, but no, they focused on academic debate over cohesive advocacy. We cardinal advocates should take note. Are we debating because we want better democracy in the real world, or because we find the question interesting and enjoy the debate for its own sake?
STAR does not pass FB criterion, so yes, there is a hypothetical scenario possible where giving your favorite less than 5 could be beneficial, but that does not mean that there's a real election scenario where that's actionable or incentivised in real time with a realistic amount of information on voter behavior available.
The mark of an ideal system is to balance competing considerations and incentives to give something that's robust all around. Score in most cases will get the same outcomes, and so I personally don't think that accuracy is the principle to look at to differentiate between them. The biggest difference is in terms of real world advocacy. Score is a dealbreaker because vote weight isn't normalized. We get attacks on STAR regularly that are not true about STAR, but that are about Score.
Strategic voting aside look at this example:
Voter Vicki is a disenfranchised voter who typically doesn't like the frontrunners in her city, which amazingly uses Score voting to elect the mayor. In this race the frontrunners are named Bad and Worse, and there are a few other options as well. She gets her ballot and fills it out honestly like so:
Bad: 1
Worse: 0
Boring: 2
Lame: 3
Obscure: 5
Because Vicki really dislikes both frontrunners, her vote is predictably less powerful than someone who actually does like one of the frontrunners and dislikes the other. Vicki's vote is thus dependably less powerful than other voters and she remains marginalized. In contrast, STAR Voting guarantees Vicki an equal and fully powerful vote for the finalist she prefers.
Sure, some people could argue that since her strength of preference is weaker it's fair that her vote cary less weight, but most would disagree.
PS. Cardinal Baldwin isn't monotonic. The extra rounds and drawn out process make a difference, so they really aren't the same systems. Just similar.
@Keith
For "better" semi-proportional methods for inclusion in a chart I mean methods in use or that people are familiar with. Or methods that are too fabulous to not include. What's SNTV?
Re Party List vs. nonpartisan PR, the difference there is the number of winners, not the partisanship.
I have no idea where exactly STAR or Cumulative should go, or which order they would go in. I'd like to think they should be reversed, but I also have no basis for that.
Agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1joMflKwR0C1u65Jg_5pLBxIga8Y8v87VapaI9MDNMcc/edit?usp=sharing
Notes are in purple and motions passed are in green.
Please feel free to add comments or additional notes if you see something that was discussed but missed.
I don't know that partisan PR is more PR than non-partisan PR. It's just less clear what exactly is getting portioned out.
Without knowing Keith had made the chart above, I also made a chart to try and hone in on this concept.
That said, I think graphing systems on a chart like this will always get pushback unless it's made with real data, and even then I doubt it's worth sharing...
In any case, single winner elections which elect plurality winners will always have lower PR than those which ensure at least majority support, and methods which take into account voters secondary and tertiary preferences and level of support for other methods will also have a higher level of PR.
Can anyone think of some better multi-winner methods that would qualify as semi-proportional?
It's worth noting that an electoral system with no PR is possible (dictatorship) and perfect proportionality is also possible if a given election had everyone neatly assigned to a viable sized team, but I focused my chart on the actionable and democratic section of the spectrum.
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