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.
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!