@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.

@toby-pereira On a ranked ballot you can't show if a 2nd choice is as good as a 1st choice or as bad as a last choice. In practice, ranked methods have to constrain how many candidates can be ranked. There are a few different ways you can look at it, but here's why I think it's the most expressive on the table (excluding cardinal methods with a bigger range)

the ability to vote on every candidate no matter how many there are, The ability to show preference order The ability to show degree of support on a 6 rating scale.

I think I know what happen in NV.Your splitline hits the Ely State prison.
The block has 30% black population, 1% Turnout and size of 500.

@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:

While I don't think it would be a good method in practice

The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice 😄

@matija Ahh, I think I understand what you meant better now. Still, I'm not sure where the incentive for bullet voting comes from (at least in a realistic situation); approval thresholding is a more common (and more realistic) strategy for informed voters.

@anniek said in Good simple semi-PR methods?:

A group I'm tangentially connected to has decided to switch from sequential proportional approval voting to cumulative voting (voters are given a number of points equal to the number of seats, and each voter can give any amount of their available points to one or more candidates). I'm concerned because I have heard that cumulative voting is susceptible to vote-splitting and bullet voting. Where can I learn more about these effects in cumulative voting?

The main problem with cumulative voting is what happens if they don't do bullet voting. Cumulative voting produces kind-of-proportional representation if voters are strategic and perfectly informed, because minority groups can coordinate to bullet-vote. However, too much honest voting by these groups can easily result in a bare majority sweeping all the seats; in other words, requires some very complicated coordination (especially in small elections).

I don't think there are any proportional methods simpler than SPAV except party-list representation, or possibly sequential Ebert (although I'd consider sequential Ebert about as simple as SPAV).

Have you asked what makes this group think of SPAV as "too complex?"

Let's say there are 5 candidates and a voter bullet votes for their favourite. According to the m-rule (the "good" way), the points would be 1, 0, 0, 0, 0. According to the n-rule (the "bad" way) it would be 4, 0, 0, 0, 0 (or equivalently 5, 1, 1, 1, 1).

But 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 would also be equivalent to 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, which doesn't really seem that good either and is biased against voters choosing not to rank all candidates (rather than being unbiased as claimed by the article).

I've always thought the most logical way is to average the ranks. So if 5 ranked candidates would get 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, then bullet voting should give 5, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5, 2.5.

Interestingly, the KP Transformation, which is a way of converting approval methods to score methods, does not work on the basis that you can simply add up a voter's score for each elected candidate to see how satisfied they are. If scores are out of e.g. 5, then each voter essentially has 5 utility slots and the top one will only be satisfied by a score of 5. So two candidates with scores of 2 and 3 being elected will mean that 40% of the voter's utility slots will be untouched. A 0 and a 5 mean that all slots will be satisfied to some extent but none more than once.

I think the KP transformation is generally good because it gives maintains good criterion compliance when added to an approval method without adding nasty surprises. And it's simple. Essentially all of the debate between Allocated Score, Method of Equal Shares, TEA etc., are about what to do with these messy scores that are hard to deal with when you use a score method rather than an approval method. KP sorts that out simply with generally better criterion compliance. So the consideration of TEA versus those other methods then becomes irrelevant.

And as I mentioned in this thread, all the subtractive quota methods are really just weak approximations of Phragmén-based methods. So I'd use Phragmén + KP as the basic starting point of a method you have to do better than. If determinism isn't essential, you can do better still.

Since you cite the Modified Borda Count (which I guess is as described at http://www.deborda.org/modified-borda-count/ ), it would seem that you are thinking about cases where a collective decision is sought as a single choice among some number of alternatives. So an example might be Puerto Rico remains a "commonwealth", becomes independent, or becomes a State; that would be three options from among which only one can be settled on.

What are the grounds or justifications for constraining every voter from awarding so many points as she chooses (from within a range fixed in advance) to each candidate? An example system that is permissive in this regard is STAR Voting.

@jack-waugh you’re completely right. I suppose what I’m calling “violence” is only violence with the potential to destabilize the status quo. In many respects that kind of violence is warranted, but I hope there are ways to stably conduct much needed changes in the status quo without violence.

I generally support the BRVE.

Something I question about it is what strategy should advocates use to try to get more people on board more or less, and to try to get it implemented.

Let's suppose for example that advocates say to members of the general public, "May we please have a statement of agreement from you for this entire slate of proposed laws?"

Then I for example am going to see that for a single-winner office, the BRVE calls for Score or Approval voting. I think that Score would be an adequate solution and Approval would be a vast improvement over status quo. However, I also think that STAR would be an adequate solution. If I endorse the BRVE, does that mean I am opposing STAR?

@jack-waugh You missed an important part of the quote.

In an election with only two candidates, the Condorcet loser criterion implies the majority criterion. Given a three-candidate Condorcet cycle, it's always possible to eliminate a candidate who didn't win so that the winner changes. Thus the Condorcet loser criterion is incompatible with independence of irrelevant alternatives.

Say you've got an A>B>C>A cycle. Without loss of generality, A wins in some method that passes the Condorcet loser criterion.

Now remove B. C beats A head-to-head so must now win (A is the Condorcet loser with only A and C). Given that removing B has changed the winner from A to C, the method must fail IIA.

I can't see a proof that it is additive. I can't see a proof that it is Frohnmayer balanced. If a system isn't both of those things, I don't know how to convince myself that it accords equal influence to the voters regardless of how many or few candidates the voters oppose. And without equality, I fear that the monied interests can find a strategy within the system to confine the voters to a Prisoner's Dilemma and thereby prevent them from having any effective power over governmental policy.

@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.

@cfrank Hey thanks so much for responding! I read some of the other posts on this forum and y'all seem so advanced here, it made me kinda nervous lol. Anyway, I actually thought about the same problem you mentioned with the averaging giving lesser known candidates an edge, following my posting of it. After doing some reading, I found a similar version of range voting proposed here: (https://rangevoting.org/SmithWM.html), which is basically just score voting. However, it also incorporates the averaging I mentioned by establishing a quota system for the minimum amount of ballots that must be cast involving each candidate before they would be eligible to win via their total score.

I figured as much in regards to reversing the numerical order from rating to ranking. My rationale for doing so was just to eliminated the strategic element of voters not using the entire range of scoring that a traditional scoring method provides. Although I suppose the same rule could be applied to the scoring method provided the number of ratings reflected the number of candidates rather than being a set (0-5), (0-9), or (0-99), scale. This seems like it would be a good way to circumvent min-maxing candidates without having to incorporate a top two runoff as in STAR, or having to use binary ratings as in Approval. I figured it probably hasn’t been popularized for a reason though, so thank you for mentioning borda counts so I can do some further research into it 🙂

@culi I'm interested in this caching. Is it a programming pattern?

@culi The forum is not dead. It's not the most active forum, but it's definitely not dead.