@brozai Received!

Reminder -- these happen every Tuesday.

@andy-dienes Thanks this is good, I like your groupings. I'd also like to hold votes that are more specific, such as "for a condorcet method, what is your preferred tiebreaker approach?" With possible answers combining ballot type (ranked, ranked allowing duplicates, rated 0-100, rated 0-5) and tiebreak tabulation method (irv, plurality, borda, score)

I don't want to do anything that requires a different log in or cookie or whatever, I'd like to know where the votes are coming from, and discourage people from voting more than once or voting if they don't even introduce themselves or participate in the community otherwise. So I'd prefer just collect the ballots manually for now, from posts and signatures here, and maybe posts on reddit's EndFPTP forum. There's also the election methods mailing list....

Remember that we can do a new one at any time, and anyone in the group can post one. I'll happily tabulate them and show pretty results and share my work on a forkable codepen , at least to get people started. Anyone is free to retabulate.

I was hoping to collect high-resolution cardinal ballots. I'd suggest rate on a scale of 0-10, decimal places allowed e.g. 5.76. If anyone wants to use a different scale, such as 0 to a million, fine, whatever...it will just be normalized anyway. And then we'll show results in a bunch of different methods. People can supply an approval threshold, if none supplied it defaults to 5. So mine might look like:

Copeland/IRV [10], Ranked Robin[9.5], Any Condorcet [9], Copeland/Normalized Score [8.7], Copeland/Score [8.5], Cardinal Baldwin [8], IRV [6], STAR [5], Approval [3], Score [2], Borda[1], FPTP [0] ApprovalThreshold: 4

(that's using what is in my signature, but some of the groupings don't make sense for a real poll, especially "any condorcet")

I'll show some ideas for the pretty results display (hopefully with some interactivity or ability to animate or whatnot) soon. You may have seen some of my work in this direction....here's a some of it: (the Sankey diagram for IRV in the upper left isn't mine but it is uses an open source library to generate them)screenvoting.png

@rob said in An idea to increase activity at this forum:

That said, in the perfect world, yes there would be a nice voting widget.

I'm gradually working toward that. I have experimented with running custom js in this forum and looking for things in posts that I can parse and replace and add interactivity. . (@Jack-Waugh has been trusting enough to allow me privileges so I can do that.... but currently nothing is running) Automatic server-side tabulation and external storage of poll data would come later if people stay interested. It's doable, but not needed to get it started.

Do you know javascript or typescript? 🙂

@rob yup, both those statements are correct!

@rob said in project to make ballot data available:

those who do know how to code can tailor them so non-coders can just paste ballots in

OK. So that's basically collaboration where coders empower non-coders to participate in the research.

Spreadsheets don't have the ability to build on the work of others

Agreed. The don't compose at all. Every spreadsheet is an idiosyncratic work.

When a reform that people think will produce democracy fails to do so, that merits a notice.

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!!!

@jack-waugh I agree soundly with you. There are many ultimately nihilistic profit seekers who are driving destructive tendencies of the global market, and that’s a full euphemism. It isn’t clear whether that nihilism is actually a value construct (well, it seems if anything to be quite rightly the opposite of one, really) or whether it’s due to a typical lack of awareness or contemplation. But a third alternative is also available, which is a simple (and in enough cases, severe) deficiency in moral character.

Another related topic I consider in this area is the attention economy. You allude essentially to addiction and what I don’t have vocabulary for beyond “post-modernist consumerism.” In my opinion, global attention is a public good that is now being subjected to the tragedy of the commons, and that is all resulting from a de-compartmentalization of access points to attention. It’s also another prisoner’s dilemma. Space and time no longer serve the functional roles of localizing attention to natural social public spheres and communities, and this only drives the lack of awareness and other issues related to mental health (I.e. attention starvation on a global scale, with concomitant depression, I.e. “influencers,” onlyfans, TikTok, etc.). More and more pornographization, commodification and exploitation of human life, even people exploiting themselves.

The only thing I can see that could possibly supplement those barriers is either an artificial enforcement of barriers (a frightening thought) or awareness and personal character. In other words, externally imposed barriers, or barriers of personal choice. Interesting times we live in. Anyway I’m glad at least that others can see this is all more than “just” a moralistic issue.

On a side note, while we’re at the water cooler, I will just mention that I watched a portion of the first Republican candidate debate. I will summarize my thoughts as, “Wow.”

@lime said in "Problematic" Ballot Exhaustion examples - RCV IRV:

Advertisement: a candidate is declared the winner and starts celebrating; then somebody comes up and explains they've found extra votes for the candidate, and the candidate suddenly loses. End with "Last year, Nick Begich lost the Alaska election because voting authorities thought he had too many votes. How could voting for someone make them lose? Don't let it happen here. Vote no on IRV."

New advertisement idea: circle of dictators at a table, bragging about how they took voting rights away from people and laughing. Suddenly, an Alaska politician stands up: "Oh, we did even better. Get this: if too many people vote for a candidate, that guy loses. Pretty great, huh?" Stunned silence. A man in uniform with a thick German accent: "that's too far." "Really?" "Ja, that's illegal in Germany."*

Voiceover: "When even the Germans are calling your system undemocratic, you have a problem. Vote no on IRV."

*Reference to BVerfG ruling on participation failures.

@toby-pereira

Yes, but the big winner, so far, in the burial-deterrence category, is RP(wv), which isn't a new-invention method, but, rather is a traditional, classical, immensely popular & high-prestige method.

@toby-pereira said in Israel, Proportional Representation, Polarization, and Accountability:

A candidate-based system, with presumably smaller regions, would be preferable in my opinion, and there would be no need for a discussion about whether a minimum threshold was good or bad.

I personally prefer candidate based PR to party list in general, but I haven't really thought that through in a Israeli/Palestinian context. In terms of Israel they currently are at one extreme of the spectrum where voters have as little say over parties candidates as possible. I definitely think any change in the opposite direction would help, even just going from Closed list to Open List. That would allow every party to ideally veto any of their candidates and leaders parroting genocidal war crime type talking points without turning their back on the party platform entirely. This seems like an easy change to start with since it would probably be less controversial than other ideas I support.

So really, under a system of PR that works and a parliamentary system that works, a stable government would have to be around the centre of public opinion. Whether that is in fact the case in Israel, I'm not really in a position to say.

My very limited understanding of Israeli politics leads me to believe that Netanyahu has been wildly unpopular most of my life, but he maintains power because nobody has been able to successfully challenge him and hold the position. I see Israel as not stable, but stagnant. I'd love to see actual Israeli citizens chime in here with some lived experience on the ground.

@toby-pereira said in Easy-to-explain Proportional (Multiwinner) elections:

By the way, Satisfaction Approval Voting can only be described as semi-proportional. You're wasting part of your vote on candidates that aren't elected. It's like SNTV except that you can split your vote up. They both have similar problems to FPTP.
They might be easy to explain, but they're not worth explaining!

You're right, of course, but that's why I like to bring up SAV as an "obvious" system with an obvious flaw (spoilers). Then I explain how PAV/SPAV fix that flaw with a minor change--split a vote only after a candidate is elected, not before.

@green said in What is the optimal electoral mechanism for use _within_ a legislature? E.g. assignment of committee membership, committee leads, general chamber officials, etc:

@lime trying to imagine what PB-VCG would look like practically in this context, given we're electing voters to offices of varying power rather than fulfilling projects with known costs. Each member votes with virtual assets, single offices "priced" and allocated with normal Vickery, set of comparable offices with VCG?

Yes, although not 100% sure what you mean by virtual. If every MP had $1 million in budget to spend (e.g. because we're using something like MES), then you can bid with that budget. Payment involves transferring part of your share to another MP.

Auction order would have a large effect.

I was thinking of a single auction to elect the whole cabinet simultaneously.

Would expect many offices to have multiple all-in bids, which is problematic when they're using equal virtual assets.

Because of collusion, you mean?

@jack-waugh said in Condorcet // Score:

@toby-pereira said in Condorcet // Score:

Under Condorcet//Score, the winner could be a candidate outside the top cycle.

But she would be the Score winner, so not a bad outcome.

Not necessarily a bad outcome in its own right, but it makes the method more discontinuous than it needs to be. A candidate who isn't in the running can suddenly win because those that are in the running get too close to each other.

I've said previously on this group that non-deterministic elections can be a good way to simplify proportional representation. It doesn't have to be as crude as simple random ballot where you have one representative per constituency selected by the drawing of a single ballot. As I said here just earlier this month:

Proportional methods tend to just be more complex by their nature. But if you allow them to be non-deterministic then that goes away. E.g. COWPEA Lottery which uses approval ballots. Or if you have a region that elects, say, 6 candidates, voters just rank their top 6 candidates. Then you consecutively pick six ballots at random and elect the unelected candidate that is highest ranked on that ballot.

This type of method, while it doesn't guarantee a very proportional result in each region, would actually give better proportionality nationally than deterministic methods that use these smallish regions (like STV), and they also keep the election candidate-based, which other nationally proportional methods tend not to.

Random ballot with just one representative per region guarantees that honest voting is the best strategy, but I tend to think that it becomes too lotteristic at that point. With e.g. five or six chances to be elected (as in the above methods), particularly popular candidates would not be on such a knife-edge of being elected.

I also think that non-deterministic methods send out a good message - that there are no "safe seats", and that representing the electorate is a privilege and not some guaranteed right.

So while non-deterministic methods might be a tough sell, I personally prefer them for national parliaments.