The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
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@cfrank
Thank you for your insights! First, I should admit that compared to the everyone else on this forum I am mathematically challenged.The organization I am starting, Voters Take Charge, will advocate for specific (often with options) reforms. We will also be reactive; we will need to decide whether or not to support proposals made by other organizations, hence all my questions about Top Four primaries.
You have inspired a couple more questions:
Is resistance to clones important in any election with similar candidates, be it a primary or any election with a lot of candidates?
Would STAR be able to handle a four or five candidate general election?
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@jack-waugh
Your point that every voter should have an equal vote is well taken, thank you.Concerning Approval Voting, I have written an article about it for the soon to exist VotersTakeCharge.us website. It needs to be evaluated. Could I post it on a new thread?
What voting system would you suggest for first round vote that selects four or five candidates to run in a general election? Assume that the political parties have already chosen their candidates and those candidates must participate in the first round.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Could I post [a draft article on Approval Voting] on a new thread?
I think that's a good idea. Did you judge that simply citing one of the existing writings on the subject likely falls short of your goals of what you want to emphasize to your intended audience?
What voting system would you suggest for first round vote that selects four or five candidates to run in a general election?
That's a deeply interesting question. Does it make better sense to assign as the primary purpose of the first-round vote, simply to sideline the worst candidates, in direct service to the goal of electing the best in the final, or does it make better sense to assign it the purpose of providing to the voters in the final round, as wide a choice of ideologies and values as feasible, crossing political spectra? Maybe a halfway-decent PR or nearly-PR system would fit there.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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Thank you for your interest in my Approval Voting article. I posted the article a couple of minutes ago. I posted under Advocacy.
The first goal for Voters Take Charge is to prove that American voters want proportional representation. Second, we will inform voters that there are better options than plurality and ranked choice voting.
My article (indeed most of my articles) is an attempt to distill the wisdom of leading election scientists into a clear and maybe concise document for my website visitors.
God willing, Round 1 of a two round system will eliminate the worst candidates and give voters a five distinct (nonclone?) candidates. To make such a proposal fly, we would need to use a system that is fair and understandable. Not easy.
BTW No labels announced that they are giving up their 2024 Presidential run for lack of a candidate. RFK jr. on the other hand is collecting nomination signatures.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
God willing, Round 1 of a two round system will eliminate the worst candidates and give voters a five distinct (nonclone?) candidates.
I hope some of the participants who are into comparing PR alternatives will take an interest in this question.
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Yes. The various organizations promoting Top Four Primaries are proposing a "choose one" vote for the first round. I would like to offer something better.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Yes. The various organizations promoting Top Four Primaries are proposing a "choose one" vote for the first round. I would like to offer something better.
Approval, for example, would be better than Choose-one Plurality. And it would be easier to explain to people than a PR system. It could be improved later, after people have become used to equality.
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@cfrank said in Before a Real Runoff:
@jack-waugh I don’t know much about PR, but this is an attempt to balance seats by considering party affiliations without stuffing clones. Can PR be improved with “Cake Cutting” incentives?
I should think that a system that does not refer to parties would work better. Simplicity is probably necessary for selling it.
Maybe Reweighted Range Voting (RRV) using the same kind of ballots (maybe Approval) as the final will use. In PR discussions, when I have brought up RRV, the PR mavens have told me that it's not one of the best options. But they don't seem to be here today, so I'm hoisting RRV up the flagpole.
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Another option for the first round of balloting and tallying is Asset Voting. Each candidate gets points for how many voters approved hir. The candidate having the least support gets to distribute it to whichever other candidates se chooses. Repeat this until the number of candidates is the number for the final plus one. Send the ones with the most support then on to the final.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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Your advocacy is elegant, I will change the opening as follows but leave the rest alone.
In support of replacing Plurality Voting with Approval Voting, eminent election scientist Jack Waugh asserts our right to better voting systems:
A voter should be the one to determine which candidates her or his vote supports and opposes. Plurality Voting does not respect this right. In an N-candidate election for a single seat or office, voters who want to oppose fewer than N - 1 are told to lump it. They are denied the right to cast a vote that reflects their political judgment.
I came up with a short version I will use on my plurality voting page:
As voters, we should have the right to choose which candidates we support or oppose. Plurality Voting does not respect this right; we can only support one candidate and oppose the rest.
Some voters are happy to support only one candidate, they will choose the lesser of two evils and call it democracy. They have the right to vote as they will, but the rest of us suffer under their limit. Should we not have the same right to vote as we will?
Voters Take Charge was created to demand that our right to vote as we choose is fulfilled. We are even more subversive; we want an election system that puts voters in control of public policy. Therefore, we demand Proportional Representation and better voting systems for single-winner elections.
Lime also suggest RRV, definitely better than STV.
Ambassador quotas and asset voting are both fascinating ideas. I can see running both up the flagpole in the future.
I am also tempted to propose something akin to DPR voting (Direct Party and Representative Voting) on steroids. Take a PR election in a five-member district; at stake are the district’s votes in the legislature, which are equal to the population of the district. The top five candidates split the district's votes based on the percentage of the vote each candidate received. The legislature would need to rewrite its rules of operation. That is a feature, not a bug.
For now I will go with your suggestion of Approval Voting for the first round of a Top Five election. Simple and fair.
I recently voted in a nonpartisan mayoral election with seventeen similar candidates and a top two runoff. Top five with approval voting would have helped. But next time I'm just going to vote for the candidate that uses the phrase "multi-modal transportation" least often. A multi-modal transportation boondoggle exists about 150 feet from my back door.
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I'm not an election scientist, let alone an eminent one, more of a voting-systems enthusiast. Anyway, I don't need you to credit me for those words of advocacy.
Regarding "Plurality", note that Approval is decided by plurality. That's why I call FPtP "Choose-one Plurality Voting".
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In regard to control of pubic policy, look up "Liquid Democracy".
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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Liquid Democracy would be exciting and much more direct than ballot initiatives. It would drive party leaders nuts.
I would love for a few small but real governments to give it a try.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
small but real governments
Smaller than the State of Rhode Island And Providence Plantatations?
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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I was thinking in terms of a small municipality, but if Rhode Island wants to go for it, great!
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Before I look into the rest of the stuff in this thread, I notice that RRV has been mentioned a few times. This is a score conversion of Thiele's Proportional Approval Voting, or PAV. However, I do not think it is the best conversion. The method known as Sequential Proportional Score Voting (SPSV) has better criterion compliance (it passes the additive and multiplicative versions of scale invariance*), and is no more complex.
*Basically if you multiply all scores by a constant and/or add a constant to all scores, the result remains unchanged.
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@toby-pereira said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
score conversion
might not be necessary. Approval ballots might suffice. So, everywhere that I mentioned RRV (out of admitted ignorance), consider PAV instead.
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But now, I see that PAV is hard to calculate. So, I don't know. I'm just suggesting that rather than top-four or top-five, maybe some calculation can be used so as to reduce the number of likely clones that make it through. Of course, one candidate from each clone family should be permitted, with sufficient support.
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I've read through this thread a bit more now. So we first want an election (with potentially quite a lot of candidates standing), where we select four candidates to go into round 2 for the election to determine the winner.
If there might be a lot of candidates standing in round 1, then to keep it simple, I would definitely recommend some form approval voting. However, under normal approval voting there is the possibility of the top four being blocked out by clones, so it might make sense to use a sequential proportional method. SPAV, the sequential version of PAV, I think would be ideal for this. It shouldn't be hard to calculate when done sequentially (in response to Jack).
PAV-based methods often aren't recommended for proportional elections because PAV isn't exactly proportional and has some failure cases. However, I don't see that as a problem here. This isn't meant to be an exactly proportional election. It's just to prevent multiple clones appearing on the final ballot. (S)PAV has better monotonicity properties than most other proportional methods - e.g. Phragmén or quota-based methods. SPAV also has a simple algorithm. Phragmén wouldn't be awful for this either, but I wouldn't recommend a method that deals with quotas.
Then for the final ballot, it's a case of what's your favourite single-winner method. And that's the big debate.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Thank you for the help! Especially for telling me about RRV. Much better STV. I think I might be able to simplify the explanation.
You're welcome! You can find other proportional cardinal systems by looking up
approval-based committee voting. (The extension to score voting is usually very simple.)I have been working on a page that explains a MMP system that elects representatives from single member districts with a pretty accurate proportionality and a minimum number of at-large seats. The downsides of course are not easy to explain and the legislature would have a different number of seats after each election. But people, especially incumbents, do like their single member districts. Should I post it on this forum when I am finished?
This would be great!
I'd suggest taking a look at biproportional representation as well; it's the current state-of-the-art for proportionally allocating seats between parties. It fixes most of the issues associated with mixed-member proportional as well: voters choose candidates instead of parties, all candidates have their own district(s) instead of having 2 separate classes, etc.
I do like Ranked Robin but it will be a bit of a challenge to explain. It needs a video and a name change to Round Robin, I saw that somewhere I think they are the same, yes? Should not let it be confused with Ranked Choice Voting.
Would be nice to see a better explanation for sure! The traditional name is "Condorcet methods", but really they should just be called "majority vote" (since the candidate with a majority over every other wins).
Would you say that the strategy concerns with Score are not so serious that an Automatic Runoff is needed?
Probably not, because strategic score ends up being equivalent to approval (which is already well-regarded as a system).
I did notice a chart that said Score does not have a clone problem but STAR does. Is that correct?
In theory, yes. In practice, STAR is interesting because it intentionally fails clone-independence to encourage a better outcome. The optimal strategy for STAR is to have every party run at least two candidates, so they can lock up both spots in the runoff. This gives each voter multiple choices they can feel comfortable with.
As an example, I'd prefer a situation where both Biden and Kamala Harris were listed separately on the ballot so I could rank Harris higher (and help her win the runoff). Right now I'm not very happy with any of the candidates in the race. On a simple left-right scale I'm close to Biden, but I would much prefer to vote for someone younger. With STAR, every voter has at least two choices they think are tolerable.
Generally I think of STAR as just reversing the primary-then-general order: we have a general election to choose the best party (the score round), and then a "primary" where we pick the best nominee by a simple majority.
Will the Alaskan Top Four model produce a lot of clones?
Not sure what you mean. The Alaska top-4 model has a disadvantage of failing clone-independence, because clones split the vote in the first round. (Which kinda sucks, because one of the few advantages of IRV over FPP is it's immune to clones in theory.)
