Forum Council

I think the argument is that it gives a more representative parliament and helps fight against voter apathy.

But I'm not sure I buy this. If people are only voting because they have to, the extra votes will come more from people who don't feel they have anything invested in any of the candidates winning, so the extra votes are more likely to be "noise".

Also, voter apathy is a thing. It's a worry that people don't feel engaged with the political system, and aren't moved to vote for any of the candidates. By forcing people to vote, you're simply hiding that. Knowing that only x % of people vote in an election should be a alarm bell to try and engage these potential voters. But if you force people to vote, you don't know how many of them are just voting under duress.

As many of you may know, Australia has implemented compulsory voting. This measure dramatically increased voter turnout and appears to have improved representation for less affluent citizens. It also obviously had influence on policy.

My first instinct was that compulsory voting violates individual expressive freedom and political choice, and may be impractical. If an electoral system is ineffective or corrupt, coerced participation removes abstention as a form of political refusal and institutional rejection.

However, I think it is better to understand the evidence and the actual tradeoffs involved. I am wondering whether, and to what extent, compulsory voting addresses concerns about representation, justice, and effective government compared with voluntary voting.

Does anybody have a more refined understanding of its implications?

@jan This sounds like it could get complicated. However, it doesn't need to be. If everyone is bringing 10 games each, I don't think there needs to be a vote on that at all. People just bring the games that they want to. Essentially everyone gets 10 nominations into the pool that you vote on.

It might be the case that one person's favourite game is owned by someone else, but they can easily ask to borrow it for their own 10.

As for what to play, if you are playing a lot of games, I would prefer some sort of proportional system rather than a simple single-winner type vote each time. E.g. If 3 out of 5 players generally prefer one type of game and 2 prefer another type, it makes sense for there to be a 3:2 split rather than the 3 choosing every time.

You could simply take it in turns to choose. Alternatively I would recommend a lottery method, so that you would get proportional representation over the long haul without having to keep track of what has already happened. I think simple random ballot, where you randomly pick who chooses each game, would be inferior to taking turns. Some people would get to choose more, just by luck.

But one alternative, which has a balance between randomness and consensus is COWPEA Lottery. Each person approves as many games as they want. Then you pick a ballot at random and if that ballot lists more than one game, you just pick other ballots at random as a tie-break. So if the next ballot approves all or none of the remaining games in contention, you ignore it. Otherwise you eliminate games not approved. Continue until one game is left. If there is still a tie after all ballots have been picked, just pick at random among the remaining games.

Hi @Jan—sounds fun

Since there are only five of you, I would not necessarily over-optimize the voting method. The harder problem is probably not the final vote, but reducing a large game list into a manageable and legible shortlist.

For choosing which games to bring, I would start with a simple structured survey. For each game, collect a few pieces of information, such as owner(s), expected duration, genre, who already knows it, who wants to play it, and maybe a 0–5 interest score from each person.

Then I would use that information to filter the list before doing any final selection. For example, remove games with very low total interest, games that are too long or too short for the trip, games too many people strongly dislike, or games that duplicate the same niche unless several people want them. If you can define those niches, you could even rank the games in each niche to help with pruning.

Since you want each person to bring the same number of games, you could then choose the top-rated games within each owner’s collection, with some manual adjustment to avoid too much overlap. Once you have a proposed list, you could also let the group ratify it before finalizing, using a simple majority or supermajority vote (or better yet, unanimous consensus), with room for minor adjustments.

For deciding what to play once you are there, I’d use something simple: score voting, approval voting, or even “everyone rates their current interest from 0–5, play the highest total unless there is an obvious objection.” Because the group is small and friendly, post-vote discussion is still cheap and probably useful. In the off-chance there’s a stalemate or something, you could have a fallback voting method.

In other words, I would use voting to organize preferences and as a fallback, not to replace conversation and negotiation. A formal voting method matters much more when the electorate is large, strategic, or anonymous, i.e. when collective conversation is inefficient or unproductive. For five friends, a transparent scoring/filtering process plus ordinary negotiation is probably better than a complicated multiwinner rule, in my opinion.

Still, using a voting system and seeing how things shake out can be fun in itself. So if you do want to go down that route, I’m sure others here would be able to offer interesting suggestions, especially on the PR front. And if you proceed with any voting systems, it would be interesting to hear about how you decided to manage the selection and any of the results!

@jack-waugh I'd like to find an explicit example eventually if possible. I haven't fully formalized the criterion as I imagine it yet. In terms of the loose "mere existence" criterion, there are definitely examples, since the modification can be applied to any voting system, and if you consider any voting system non-additive, then we can use that one.
For the updated concept, I think both the concept itself and the concept of what it means for a system to be additive need improved formalization. Do you think you can suggest what it means for a system to be additive mathematically?

@cfrank , in regard to your post, do you want to cite an example that would meet the condition you have in mind but not be seen by me as "additive"?

@robla The feedback I've heard from various stakeholders and reformers across the landscape is that many people oppose narrowing the field too much, which can prevent minor parties from having a meaningful voice in the general or being seen as viable. Being on the general ballot is an important part of the path to becoming viable for a third party.

For that reason, I think there's more consensus around advancing a set number of candidates to the general (instead of setting an approval threshold). Given that the voting method does fine with multiple viable candidates, I think advancing the top 4, 5 or 6 is totally reasonable. The upper limit is set by voter fatigue.

I think two stage Approval is generally the way to go for Approval elections. Approval Top-Two makes a lot of sense for jurisdictions that already have Top-Two, but all other things being equal I'd recommend Approval Top-5 or Top-4. I'm not sure if an even number is better or not, but that's something that should be studied and modeled for each system.

For STAR I generally recommend having a conditional primary, where the top 5 (or 4) advance. And, if less candidates than that register you just skip the primary all together, which saves a bunch of money.

@jack-waugh I was reflecting on the balance criterion, and considered a direction for formalization of it that might protect against the adversarial construct I described some years ago.

The idea is to enforce not just existence of “opposite” ballots, which can be too weak, but to demand something like, “There is a public, computationally-tractable ‘reversal’ operation on ballots, induced by the ballot semantics (in some way…), such that every ballot and its reversal cancel under the outcome rule.”

Certain symmetry operations such as permuting/relabeling candidates should commute with the reversal. The above would prohibit the “password attack” mechanism I described, because the ballot reversal operation in that case is neither public nor generally computable.

I’m refraining from demanding additivity in the score-like sense to see whether the property of direct interest can be formalized in some way without it.

Just food for thought.