Posts made by SaraWolk

@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.

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!

UPDATE: The North Dakota Governor vetoed the bill and the legislature wasn't able to get enough votes to veto the veto, so Approval Voting in Fargo stands!!!!

Montana did just successfully pass another RCV ban bill this week though.

@sarawolk
Here's my current proposal (updated with feedback from many of you.) I'll keep updating/editing it with suggestions I like as I hear more ideas from more of you. Currently we have 7 higher level categories and 25 subcategories. My current proposal would bring us to 9 categories and 11 subcategories.

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

• Advocacy and Events

• Voting Method Discussion:
  ** Voting Methods
  ** New Voting Methods

• Districting

• Money in Politics

• Election Integrity

• Forms of Government

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

• Watercooler

If you have another proposal or just ideas and considerations to incorporate please comment and share below.

4/30/23 Forum Council Meeting
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vxWSORsfqQNauUGIQHf-ZZZyUV68EsPz4t0GGx9TRAI/edit?usp=sharing

7/20/21 Forum Council Meeting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1joMflKwR0C1u65Jg_5pLBxIga8Y8v87VapaI9MDNMcc/edit?usp=sharing

2/17/21 Forum Council Meeting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w8nufAhdLKMjAFLa2lAGtPor9Tb6-SQYVwmNt0WHa6w/edit?usp=sharing

12/9/20 Forum Council Meeting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BTLIsMw7guSSckyjGAp2L1xVlcG3KqRCdk-6f9wltso/edit

10/7/20 Forum Council Meeting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11-xf97-omH_Qe95oTBQb90aaaQbb6E934k-noQRwv_8/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.

Forum Council meetings are called and conducted as needed.

A number of people have expressed agreement that we should simplify the forum's categories list. At today's Forum Council meeting we discussed the goals and proposals and decided to continue the conversation here on the Forum to finalize a proposal.

Goals:

• Easy to navigate and find posts.
• No overlap between categories. Each post should ideally have a clear place it should live. For "categories" that do overlap we can use tags.
• Not too many options. Easy to determine where your post should go.
• Welcoming and inviting: We want to create space for the larger electoral reform movement to use this forum for discussions that are currently happening elsewhere.

Here's the current list:

For reference here's an older thread on this topic.

• https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/227/way-too-many-categories/6

Thanks to everyone who came to today's council meeting!

Cliff's Notes:

• We had nine people total and three of the four council members present.
• We were able to get through everything on the agenda, and we added a number of new people to leadership positions!
• We also made some plans and set some good intentions going forward.
• This meeting followed the trend of our previous council meetings, and all discussions passed were unanimous (with some abstentions.)
• We had general consensus to simplify our categories list, but didn't have agreement on a specific proposal, so we decided to continue the discussion here on the forum and then vote when we're ready.

Here's to a great next era of the Voting Theory Forum!

To everyone who RSVPed, attended, volunteered, gave input, or stepped up to serve in a leadership position. Thank you!!!

@all Hello everyone. Reminder that tomorrow we're holding our next Forum Council Meeting. Please come if you are interested in helping us steer this ship and keep growing the forum to be the resource and community we need.

We are looking for committed volunteers, moderators, and council members, and we also want to hear your thoughts and ideas. If you aren't on the council but care about the forum please feel free to join us.

Council Meeting: Sunday April 30th at 1pm PT/4pm ET.
Event details and zoom link here: https://www.equal.vote/council_meeting_30_april_2023

Okay. Message received. Thank you Jack for all you've put in to help build this forum. We couldn't have done it without you!

I'll keep you looped in if there's anything on the tech team that comes up.

@toby-pereira If 'None of the Below' wasn't able to stop the count then it could only block one seat from being filled. I agree that's a simpler and more transparent implementation, but it seems like the intention is to be able to block multiple candidates if needed.

That has come up as a needed mechanism for the local Green Party in the past. I wasn't following it closely but my memory is that a few years ago they had a number of candidates who were all super problematic. One had been allegedly threatening others in leadership who opposed him, one was a Holocaust denier, and one was a Libertarian who was really not a Green at all but who had failed to get elected by their own party and was still looking to get a seat. My understanding was that most people in the Green party would have preferred that none of the above be elected into their party leadership. It also was a major factor that got them backtracking on supporting PR in general because they realized they wanted higher thresholds in cases like that. If there was a way to have PR for diversity of views on issues, but also have a minimum quality control mechanism, I think they would have gone for that.

@AnnieK Another simpler and more transparent way to do the same thing could be for multi-winner PR elections would be to have a two round vote with the 2nd round a simple yes/no to ensure that x threshold is met. For example lets say there are 100 voters, 5 seats, and you want all the candidates to have at least a 20% threshold. You could have a PR election and generate a candidate ranking list from it. (A came in 1st place, B came in 2nd, etc.) Then you go down that list top to bottom and vote each person in one-by-one until all seats are filled or until there are no more candidates to vote on. That would ensure that only candidates who get a explicit yes from 20 voters would win.

Does anyone see any issues with that? Modifications like this might break the guarantee of proportionality, depending, but could accomplish other goals that might be worth while.