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
@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:
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.
@wolftune My understanding, correct me if I'm misremembering, is that a quota rule for cardinal methods like this is ensured if voters bullet vote, Party List style, but not necessarily if they don't. This seems like an edge case example of that, and it does seem like an edge case, but it raises good questions. (That I'm planning to post in a dedicated thread soon, when I have time to engage with the replies.) Namely, the definition of proportionality used for ordinal methods is pretty crude for describing Cardinal or Condorcet PR.
Cardinal PR (unlike Ordinal) can allow voters and factions to coalition naturally (even if the candidates or parties don't) by addressing vote-splitting, and they also combat the notorious PR polarization stagnation that academics warn about, but they can't also always fend off against the mythical homogenized centrist who everyone agrees is meh.
This is an example of why I like STAR more than Score, and we haven't fully applied those principles to PR.. yet. I still think a hybrid approach is the key to unlocking that next level.
Our STAR-PR committee looked at a few options for selection, including highest score (simplest) and Monroe (which I think would address this.) Highest score won out, but realistically the two were pretty well dead tied.
In any case, I think that Clones are a much bigger problem in hypothetical math scenarios than they ever will be in real life campaigns, and if a faction can really pull off running 2 or 3 clones that all break through and win over voters then that's frankly impressive. The reality is that if voter behavior doesn't do them in, limitations in campaign funding and volunteer power likely will.
I'd still take STAR-PR edge cases over STV edge cases, but I won't claim it's perfect and that nobody will ever come up with something even better. This is still the cutting edge of voting theory.
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/
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.
I think that's a bit confusing and redundant. Having replies only show up under the comment they are replying to would be better.
@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.
@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.
@robertpdx All voting methods which pass Later No Harm fail Favorite Betrayal Criteria, meaning that it's not always safe to vote for your honest favorite and you should consider voting lesser-evil instead.
Voting methods which pass this criteria fail to eliminate vote-splitting.
It's not a good pass/fail criteria. It's an important consideration to balance to find a well rounded system that does a good job overall.
This article explains: https://www.starvoting.us/farewell_to_pass_fail
Right, at a glance this detail makes the system not viable or practical for scaled or official elections, imo.
Also, there are a number of ways to find the top two candidates, (Borda, Condorcet, IRV, etc..) Quantity of support isn't explicit enough.
Another point is that a given voter's support cut-off (ie. Approval Threshold) is absolutely relative to the other options. It's not a concrete thing.
What is the intention behind the proposal? Just a thought experiment?
2CV now ensures, unlike any other proposed system, that the winner will, under all circumstances, be one who received at least 51% of 1st or 2nd choice votes.
A voters 2nd choice may be as good as their favorite or almost as bad as their last choice. There's no way to know, so ensuring a majority of 1st and 2nd choice votes is meaningless. Also, in any election where you can support multiple candidates there could be multiple majority supported options. The key is to find the one with the most support by looking at strength of support and/or number of voters who prefer them, ideally both.
I think we've already gone in circles about your other responses in previous conversations so I won't repeat that again here.
@cfrank How would you propose doing a ranked ballot with a support cutoff? This sounds simple but I'm not visualizing an elegant or simple way to do that.
@psp_andrew-s said in **INTRODUCING** 2-Choice Voting (2CV) - An Improved Iteration on RCV and STAR:
Simple and easy to explain to prospective voters (THIS IS IMPORTANT)
Thank you all for taking the time to comment. I agree with most of the concerns about this proposal that people have already raised. I raised a few of them myself in the Twitter Space where I first heard about it, on Twitter, and also in Open Democracy Discussion.
To summarize a few.
@cfrank The issue with only ranking candidates you approve is that that gives minority faction voters who don’t like the frontrunners no voice. Unless they’re strategic… but then they basically have to disregard the instructions.
In the context of political parties, where a voter can only affiliate with one party and vote for one party, it's fairly easy to define proportional as you say, @wolftune, that "if there's a clear block of voters enough to have a quota of a seat, that block gets to elect whoever they prefer."
This is a simple and transparent result, which has value, but it's not necessarily the best result, because we know that voters are not factional hardliners that agree with their parties only and disagree with everyone else 100% all the time.
For a better example we can take 6 parties with candidates; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple. Blue voters would give Blue 5 stars, but also like cool colors in general. Orange voters love Orange but also like warm colors like Yellow and Red. Red voters also like Orange but also like Purple. These parties supporters also tend to like Brown, though it's not a color on the color wheel and thus not a real party in Colorland. Lets also say that Red and Purple voters actually slightly prefer Ultraviolet and Infrared, though those colors make no sense to most voters.
In a quota rule PR election where there are 6 winners is it fair if Brown, who is liked by all and highest scoring overall never wins? When parties overlap and Venn Diagram, who is to say which is the "real" faction? Is a winner set the most representative if Ultraviolet and Infrared win, even though they were disliked by every other faction, while Red and Purple were also loved by their supporters but were also well liked by their peers?
My point is that real voters have nuanced preferences, so an expressive 5 star PR method can and should take the strength of those preferences into account. (Allocated Score does this in determining which voters get allocated to a given winner. Adding runoffs to the winner selection, or doing Monroe Selection would do this even more, with some added complexity.)
As said above, the definition of PR that we use for List PR or STV, if applied to a score ballot, would say that if a quota bullet votes then they will win a seat. That works for ordinal methods, but it specifically selects for polarizing winner sets and could care less about electing candidates who represent more voters when possible. This also might allocate voters and consider them represented by a candidate who they ranked 5th and dislike, or who they only voted for as a lesser evil.
We could also aim for a stricter proportionality criteria that does recognize and reward consensus candidates, particularly if they are alternatives that are representative for factions that slightly prefer a highly polarizing or antagonistic option.
A reasonable definition of high spectrum PR might be that "if there's a clear block of voters enough to have a quota of a seat, that block gets to elect the most widely supported of the candidates they like." Another way to think about that is that "that block gets to elect the least polarizing of the candidates they like." (Q: what score is a candidate who is "liked" by a voter? 4? 3?)
This guarantees the most representative proportional winner set possible and likely would find the most effective but still diverse winner set. It doesn't guarantee that everyone gets their favorite. It does get each faction an advocate who is likely to be more effective with the larger elected body, however.
@toby-pereira Right, that's what I'm saying. I should have been more clear.
Approval, STAR, Ranked Robin, Score, etc. all pass the Equality Criterion. The Equality Criterion is literally the test of One Person, One Vote, ie an equally weighted vote, according to the Supreme Court, but because you're voting for multiple candidates and you're literally casting multiple votes, it really doesn't seem like it.
The Approval pitch that "the candidate with the most votes wins" explicitly defines an Approval as a vote and states that each voter can cast multiple votes. (This makes Approval comply with Plurality laws, but not "vote for 1" laws.)
So, explaining why Approval does pass One Person, One Vote isn't easy, especially on the scale needed. In any case, it's absolutely something CES needs to get in front of.
In contrast, in STAR and RCV your vote ultimately only counts for one candidate, or as an abstention between the finalists. Oregon, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania all have constitutions that requite voters to only cast a vote for one candidate, so this is important legally.
@jack-waugh I think the key is to educate people and especially politicians that the definition of One Person One Vote is an Equally Weighted Vote. That said, it's not intuitive and probably will lose most people unless they care to spend some time on it.
To me this is one of the biggest reasons I don't think Approval (despite it's simplicity) is the reform that can beat RCV. That and the fact that you can't show you prefer your favorite over your lesser evil without approving them both.
I still think Approval is a good system and if I could snap my fingers I'd make it the default everywhere, but still.
@wolftune My understanding, correct me if I'm misremembering, is that a quota rule for cardinal methods like this is ensured if voters bullet vote, Party List style, but not necessarily if they don't. This seems like an edge case example of that, and it does seem like an edge case, but it raises good questions. (That I'm planning to post in a dedicated thread soon, when I have time to engage with the replies.) Namely, the definition of proportionality used for ordinal methods is pretty crude for describing Cardinal or Condorcet PR.
Cardinal PR (unlike Ordinal) can allow voters and factions to coalition naturally (even if the candidates or parties don't) by addressing vote-splitting, and they also combat the notorious PR polarization stagnation that academics warn about, but they can't also always fend off against the mythical homogenized centrist who everyone agrees is meh.
This is an example of why I like STAR more than Score, and we haven't fully applied those principles to PR.. yet. I still think a hybrid approach is the key to unlocking that next level.
Our STAR-PR committee looked at a few options for selection, including highest score (simplest) and Monroe (which I think would address this.) Highest score won out, but realistically the two were pretty well dead tied.
In any case, I think that Clones are a much bigger problem in hypothetical math scenarios than they ever will be in real life campaigns, and if a faction can really pull off running 2 or 3 clones that all break through and win over voters then that's frankly impressive. The reality is that if voter behavior doesn't do them in, limitations in campaign funding and volunteer power likely will.
I'd still take STAR-PR edge cases over STV edge cases, but I won't claim it's perfect and that nobody will ever come up with something even better. This is still the cutting edge of voting theory.