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.

@masiarek I really like a new method that takes some time to understand. It's called a dodgson-hare synthesis
see http://jamesgreenarmytage.com/dodgson.pdf
Abstract: In 1876, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proposed a committee election procedure that chooses the Condorcet winner when one exists, and otherwise eliminates candidates outside the Smith set, then allows for re-votes until a Condorcet winner emerges. The present paper discusses Dodgson’s work in the context of strategic election behavior and suggests a “Dodgson-Hare” method: a variation on Dodgson’s procedure for use in public elections, which allows for candidate withdrawal and employs Hare’s plurality-loser-elimination method to resolve the most persistent cycles. Given plausible (but not unassailable) assumptions about how candidates decide to withdraw in the case of a cycle, Dodgson-Hare outperforms Hare, Condorcet-Hare, and 12 other voting rules in a series of spatial-model simulations which count how often each rule is vulnerable to coalitional manipulation. In the special case of a one-dimensional spatial model, all coalitional voting strategies that are possible under Condorcet-Hare can be undone in Dodgson-Hare, by the withdrawal of candidates who have incentive to withdraw.

Also, I haven't read the paper so don't know how they technically define that criterion, but it doesn't pass it as it's worded in English. Say we have:

35: A>B>Everyone else
33: B>A>Everyone else
32: Everyone else>B>A

Under IRV, B will win this election. That doesn't pass "majority rule, which ensures the election of a candidate from the majority coalition while preventing opposition voters from influencing the choice of candidate from the faction they oppose."

I started on some simulation code. The simulation in it is incorrect and even then, only attempted to address one voting system. The parts of the program where it collects the problem definition from the user/researcher and abandons the simulation if it is still running when the researcher changes the problem (which can require so little action as moving a slider control), work correctly. However, since the start of 2023, I have been acting out an obsession with rewriting the underlying computer-sciencey stuff as cleaner code (but not changing the basic strategy).

@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.”

@masiarek

Condorcet method, so the main thing (in my view) to look out for is whether or not its cycle-resolving rule makes it immune to turkey-raising or not.
I've heard that a few Condorcet methods are immune to turkey-raising but I don't have more info about this.
Perhaps, in the event of a false Condorcet cycle generated by tactical voting, the smallest-margin victory will always belong to the "turkey".

@jack-waugh said in Condorcet Score:

@cfrank, Ouch!

OK, then, how about this one?

Collect Score-style ballots. If there is a Condorcet winner, elect her. Otherwise, elect the straight Score winner.

I think Smith//Score is better than Condorcet//Score. Condorcet//Score could elect the Condorcet loser.

Or what I was discussing here, which I think is just Landau//Score. But maybe that's getting a bit complex.

What about This one?

@cfrank said in Ranked Choice Star Voting ?:

@isocratia I’m not sure how score and approval can be said to solve the problem of burial at all, if one considers bullet voting to be a form of it.

I think burying is generally seen as putting a candidate underneath other preferred candidates. Normally in score/approval they'd be equally scored zero or unapproved.

@masiarek

I'm fairly sure it's straightforward. Look at the final two candidates, and any candidate ranked below either of them on a voter's ballot is red.

Edit: Also I think that example image is slightly wrong, the ballot that has D > F > B > ... should have B in black.

I believe that the later-no-harm criterion is so confusingly worded that people think it means something it doesn't. It's defined in terms of not harming a candidate, but people think that it means that adding a second, third, ranking etc. will never harm the voter. So they think that LNH means that every voter has an incentive to give their full ranking.

Because IRV fails the participation criterion, it's possible that the voter can be harmed even by adding their first choice. Sure, this will never change the winner from their first choice to someone else, but it could change the winner from their second choice to their 15th choice.

LNH is meaningless without the participation criterion and it's trivial to show that failing the participation criterion means that a voter can be harmed by adding their second choice as well (e.g. their first choice gets eliminated and their second choice causes a participation criterion failure).

The only method that satisfies both LNH and the participation criterion is... plurality voting. Or some kind of plurality-equivalent ranked voting which only looks at the first choices. And here it's clear that it only satisfies LNH by completely ignoring everything else after the first choice.