@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.

Hopefully it's now been sent.

There's also a discussion of different PR philosophies on the wiki. It doesn't really cover all the ground though, as COWPEA or COWPEA Lottery wouldn't be included, for example. But perhaps non-deterministic methods deserve their own entry on there.

Optimised PAV Lottery is another non-deterministic method. In this you work out the optimum amount of weight each candidate should have (by e.g. infinitely cloning all candidates and running an election with a very large number of seats), and then elect candidates probabilistically according to these weights. (Though you would have to work out the distribution again every time a candidate is elected). Unlike deterministic PAV, it is thought (though not known) to be proportional by passing the Perfect Representation In the Limit criterion.

I also think that sequential methods generally fail participation (for a suitable multi-winner definition), whereas optimal elect-all-at-once methods are computationally infeasible. However, I think non-deterministic sequential methods can get around this failure. Optimised PAV Lottery is computationally infeasible anyway, but COWPEA Lottery is easily runnable.

@isocratia said in Vertical composition of multiwinner approval methods:

My basic use-case for this technique is when the first phase is simple bloc approval voting that filters out anyone with more than, say, 75% disapproval (this threshold is a parameter), and the second phase is some proportional approval voting method.

I would do the opposite: filter out anyone who would skew proportionality then apply a single winner method.

@cfrank, I don't know how to calculate a probability distribution over a collection of rankings. Maybe someone who knows statistics can understand your proposal and maybe critique it.

In regard to "tragedy", I judge that too broad a word, as it includes accidents, and "past", not fully accurate, because, among other reasons, Mr. Biden is killing children by the minute with US resources.

I ask you to join me in mourning the death of Layan Mohammed Sayed Al-Aker, who was two years old, a girl.

I ask you to join me in spending a minute and a few tears on Samir Mahmoud Hassan Abu Al-Hawa, who was a man, aged 62.

I received the suggestion to "hold space" from an organization, the "US Campaign for Palestinian Rights". Is this organization a grift? Yes, to an extent, they probably are, as indicated by the fact that they have an "executive director", which usually means a person drawing pay out of donations. Nevertheless, I judge the message of this organization more honest than the official story, which "happy Thanksgiving" ties into. This organization suggests for things-taking day, among other practices (which I admit to not having followed):

When you gather with your loved ones, hold space for mourning the mass killing of Indigenous people from Turtle Island to Palestine. Hold a mourning ritual based in your community’s traditions. You may read the names and stories of our beloved people killed by colonial violence (for example, see here).

So I'm endorsing this organization's request, the one that I repeated above, in the context of your having wished me a happy Thanksgiving at this fraught time.

@jack-waugh I don't think this would work for PR, not in its current guise anyway. It wouldn't be proportional for party voting. If everyone scored 0 to candidates of their favourite party and -1 to everyone else, then a voter's pain for each candidate is just 0 or 1. The most popular party would win all the seats.

@jack-waugh It's fairly well known that approval and score voting pass Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives in a technical sense. But if you added/removed candidates, then voters would likely change their score/approval threshold, so in practice they would still fail IIA.

One option would be 3s/2+4s+5s

@cfrank I think it's more of a multi-election system, and it's kind of orthogonal to whether there are multiple winners or what method is used to determine the winner (plurality, RCV, etc). It's about how many votes you can cast on a given issue, for situations where "one person, one vote" is effectively unfair to minorities who are affected more sharply then the majority by a particular question. (Disclaimer: this is all just my impression and I might have it totally wrong.)

So if you're on a city council and you'll be voting on 100 bills this term, and a lot of them are about stuff in other districts that you don't care much about, but a few are really important in your district, you could use more of your allotted votes on the ones you care about, so you're less likely to get overruled by people who don't know or care as much about it.

In some variants, each vote costs money, so a billionaire can buy as many votes as they can afford. But at $1/vote, even if they spend $500M to get 500M votes, they could only overrule sqrt(500M)=22,360 people who disagree and spend $1 each on their votes. So it's a way to allow people to buy as many votes as they want if there's an issue that's super important to them, but without letting the wealthy become dictators.

@masiarek it’s common to consider the plurality/choose one algorithm as operating on rank ballots, it just counts the number of first place rankings of each candidate and chooses the candidate with the highest count. The tallies are just those first-place counts. In these cases, since the lower rankings don’t matter for the outcome of the method, the ballots usually serve as indications of true preferences, or in contrast, as examples of tactical voting, usually to mitigate vote splitting.

In this example, you can see that under plurality voting, the two top-right voters would benefit by tactically raising C above B against their actual preference, essentially colluding with the lower four voters. In a sense, B would have spoiled the election for C. This is vote splitting and Duverger’s law in action, and ultimately the reason we have two huge honking awful parties.

It also demonstrates how Condorcet methods are resistant to certain kinds of tactical voting. In the example, C is the Condorcet winner and A is the Condorcet loser. In an election that may fail to elect an existing Condorcet winner, the majority who prefers the Condorcet winner to the alternative has a tactical incentive to collude and form strategic ballots to secure their preference.

Unfortunately this may be a slim or non-existing majority, but the hope is that it’s a broad one.

Adam helped me get in contact Jeanne who sent over the whole ballot data. I have it here in case anyone is interested
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18rBTSqzOAoGK4ZTsaFy5LfU-IiMbYBpkgkUE6vqz8mA/edit?usp=sharing
Jeanne said to credit David McCune with the original work of processing the raw cvr ballots

They said they would post a recording of the debate on Youtube.

It was generally rather biased against alternatives to Hare.

Maybe it would make sense to regard a canonical preference matrix as having only an upper triangle. However, for software, I think it is convenient to represent it using the whole matrix.

@sarawolk yes more or less a thought experiment, trying to address some dissonance between the possibility of a Condorcet winner having low support and a support (approval) winner being different from the Condorcet winner even when one exists.

In this case, I mean that a candidate is either supported or not supported by a voter according to the support cutoff of their ballot. I’m using the word “support” rather than “approval,” because I don’t think approval is an appropriate word philosophically (or mathematically). The positive emotional connotation of “approve” is all that bothers me. “Support” seems more emotionally neutral and has a mathematical meaning that aligns well with what is happening in the system, for example, “the support of a distribution.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_(mathematics)

The quantity of support of a candidate is simply the number of voters who formally support that candidate on their ballot.

Here is another attempt at a modification. In sequence, if there is a Condorcet loser, they are eliminated. If there is no Condorcet loser, a candidate with the least quantity of support is eliminated, with ties broken by rank runoff if possible. Repeat until one candidate remains.

@psp_andrew-s

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

Here's a simple example to show proportionality. This example works the same no matter what the measure of support. Basically, all these measures are clones of STV but without vote splitting. The measures I'm talking about are score, smallest pairwise win, and strongest beatpath. Also, I should say that I don't really know if the measures would work for sorting.

Setup:
2 parties: A, B.
2 seats.
100 voters.
quota: 50 voters.

Round 1:
The votes are A 55, B 45.
The best quotas of 50 voters give A 50 and B 45.
A gets a seat. The quota of 50 A-voters are removed.

Round 2:
Now we count the remaining voters, A 5, B 45.
B gets a seat.