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Thank you both for keeping an eye on this and deleting the spam. If you have suggestions for the settings I'm open to whatever seems like the best option. I don't have strong opinions either way as long as people like you both are taking care of it if it does occur.
If that wasn't the case I'd say we should look into other options.
I've just learnt from Rob Lanphier on the election methods mailing list of the death of Jameson Quinn after an accident while hiking in Guatemala. This is very sad news and a lot of you will be familiar with Jameson from his contributions to the voting method community over many years. I used to communicate with him about cardinal proportional methods and he's the only person from the community that I've ever met in person, back in 2017 I think.
Rob's original message can be seen here and the message from his mother posting the news is here.
I discussed something similar here and there's a video here as well. There's a video as well which shows a potential ballot design.
In what I discussed the top voted candidate in each district was automatically elected in the first phase.
@matija Do you need the first step about the electing the candidate with most votes in each district but only if they have a Hare quota? You could just do the whole process using the PR system. Or just elect the candidate with most votes anyway and just use the PR system for the second ones to be elected.
@matija True. If individual ballot data can be used, then the funding that results from each could be split equally across the candidates approved on that ballot. But this still might not be very satisfactory.
@matija If public funding is proportional to votes, then I'd say it's easier with approval voting than ranks. With ranks, you could use top votes as you say, but then you might give less funding to the election winner (by IRV, Condorcet or whatever).
@cfrank I've seen a few as well which I've deleted, but they're not overwhelming the board or anything, so I wouldn't want to make anything worse for any new users we might get, which isn't that many anyway! So I'd probably say leave it for now, but keep an eye on the situation.
@cfrank Yes. I think parties have their place as it makes it easier to know what someone is standing for in some cases and can simplify the process for voters, but I don't think they should form an essential part of the process, and it should be just as possible for independent candidates to stand.
@gregw COWPEA doesn't pass consistency. Fairness is subjective. But COWPEA itself is just a proportional weighting thing rather than an election method itself. The lottery version could be used for elections but being non-deterministic would likely be a difficult sell.
One other method would be to pick a voter and split their representation equally among the candidates that they have approved. This would be strategy-proof. However, it fails candidate Pareto efficiency.
1 voter: AB
1 voter: A
B would get 1/4 of the weight, and A 3/4. But B is Pareto dominated by A.
Another method is called the Conditional Utility Rule. This puts all the voter's representation onto the candidate that is most approved overall (or splits it equally if there's a tie). This guarantees a the maximum total approval score among a proportional result. But it fails IIB.
2 voters: A
1 voter: B
7 voters: AB
This would weight A:B 9:1. Passing IIB would give 2:1. But despite guaranteeing the maximum total approval score for a proportional result, it still fails multi-winner Pareto efficiency. It can sometimes be possible to find a set that dominates the winning set, although the result won't be proportional. See the result on this page. This is another reason why the multi-winner Pareto efficiency criterion is not necessarily a good thing within the voting election landscape.
I think this is largely it. This project hasn't purely been altruistic - it's been helpful to me by laying everything out for reworking my COWPEA paper!
