@micahscopes said in Hello from Micah:

I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems".

I have found that everybody ends up there eventually

@rob said in Hello:

I know you think about candidates in absolute terms while I think relatively.

Not sure what you mean by thinking of candidates in absolute terms. I have always been emphatic that voters should score RELATIVE to the others on the ballot.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm not sure I understand your question (or what that has to do with it eliminating the negative effects of vote splitting, which to me is a completely different issue than how you resolve one particular scenario).

Proof by counter example is a perfectly rigorous method for mathematical proof. I pointed out a scenario where negative voting could not encode enough expression to resolve both vote splitting instances on the ballot. You reply by stating that Approval Voting (which I did not mention) will not encode all the information needed to resolve an issue unrelated to vote splitting.

@rob said in Hello:

The strategy is very similar to strategy in FPTP, but you've got more options.

Agreed. Vote splitting still exists but it is better than plurality voting.

@rob said in Hello:

I think it is common for voters to only have a strong opinion about a single candidate

This is what I was doubting in the last email. I would need some real evidence before I endorsed a system that baked that assumption into it.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm highly skeptical that various studies (that by necessity seek to answer very generalized questions) prove anything one way or the other, but I don't really care to debate that at this point.

I agree that it is hard to get a definitive answer. In the absense of a knowing I would stay away from restricting the expression of voters. This comes with a trade off in complexity where the spectrum is something like

plurality - Negative voting -IRV - Approval - Score - STAR

You need to be to the right of IRV to not have vote splitting and that is what I think is the most important.

@masiarek hay I think I got an email from you. Just curious about it.

@frenzed said in Hello from Ed Hitchcock, New Zealander in France:

We need politicians to work in cooperation in groups, because the other option is dictatorship.

I don't see how you arrive at that.

Unless you consider groups to include things like "the Senate," any a particular Congressional committee, or some sort of special interest group that concentrates on a single issue (e.g. the Sierra Club). But those aren't parties. Parties tend to encompass everything, that is, a politician is a member of one party to the exclusion of other parties. That makes everything tribal, as well as correlating things that aren't necessarily correlated in every voters' mind. (for instance, say I am anti-abortion but pro-gun control)

I like the idea that both voters and candidates can consider each issue independently. Parties tend to force them together.

The problem in the US (and in many jurisdictions) is that the elections system freezes out all but two estalished parties.

Sure. Duverger's law. That's because of plurality voting, which I think most of us consider "the enemy."

A recent election for mayor of San Francisco (where I live) had 8 candidates, none of which were affiliated with a party. This worked because there was a ranked choice election. (IRV is not perfect, but it sure is better than plurality).

Some of the candidates "teamed up", advertising together and such. (saying things like "whichever of us you put first, put the other one second") Various special interest groups endorsed one or more candidates, but the candidates weren't "members" of any group, at least not to the exclusion of other groups.

How is that dictatorship? Even if it is for a parliamentary type election (Senate, Congress, board of Supervisors, etc), I don't see how parties are needed or benefit anyone if the election method is resistant to vote splitting.

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@dave Welcome.

I made a post about SMDPR a few days back. It is here

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/159/smdpr

@last19digitsofpi Hey Last19digitsofpi. (8473645284273355832 if I remember correctly?)

Welcome. Glad you come in peace. Peace is good, so don't be stirring the shit. 🙂

Kidding. Precinct summability has some practical value I suppose, but other things are far more important. I'm not all that into PR but others obviously are. (I tend to think that improving single winner methods is a lower hanging fruit, at least in the US)

My big emphasis is "voting on voting methods" (eat our own dogfood, create consensus, etc) and creating useful Codepens for tabulating and visualizing. So if you know javascript, then double-welcome!

@denis-falvey Welcome! Thanks for sharing and discussing your work here!