The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
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I'm not sure why having separate primaries is necessary (most countries and don't have anything like that)
You are right, primaries are not necessary, however they are traditional.
I also have practical reasons:
Eliminating primaries would generate opposition and negative publicity.
By giving political parties primary options, (closed, semi-open, open & do it yourself) I hope that parties will be more receptive to my proposal, at least in comparison to the non-partisan proposals.
Primaries serve to bring public attention and participation to parties' nominating processes. This could be a big help for third-parties if there are reasonably low barriers to primary participation.Parties are inevitable in a democratic system, and serve important purposes. We need competition between more strong parties.
(Honestly, I think the main reason IRV uses a 4-candidate primary is that failures like nonmonotonic elections become more common the more candidates you have. Using a top-4 primary makes it easy to sweep those failures under the rug.)
I bet you are right.
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Both SPAV Sequential proportional approval voting and the Excess Method
The Excess Method: A Multiwinner Approval Voting Procedure to Allocate Wasted Votes
would work well in narrow down the field in large elections.SPAV is a lot easier to count and explain and should work quite well.
The Excess Method adds calculations after the election of each candidate to distribute the seat winning candidate's excess approvals. This will, at least in theory, better represent the will of the voters. With the Excess Method, voters could approve all the candidates they like with no concern for strategy or temptation to tactical vote.
A difficult decision. Do you have a dog in this race?
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
voters could approve all the candidates they like with no concern for strategy or temptation to tactical vote.
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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@jack-waugh
First, let me thank (in order of appearance) Lime, cfrank, Jack Waugh, and Toby Pereira for all the help!In my last post I made the statement regard the Excess method of allocating wasted votes:
Voters could approve all the candidates they like with no concern for strategy or temptation to tactical vote.Jack Waugh suggested that I consider Gibbard's theorem.
Perhaps I was too enthusiastic in my praise of the Excess method. Or perhaps I am too generous as to what I consider to be good strategy resistance for a voting system.
I am impressed if a voting system has a voter strategy that that is reasonable and simple enough that all or most voters will be inclined to follow, and if they follow it the system produces fair results or if the calculation of a successful strategy for individual voters or organized voters is so difficult voters will resort to voting their true preferences.
I admit both, especially the latter, leave open the possibility of strategic regret.
Still, I think that the Excess method, though cumbersome, would produce fair results.
Latest news from Colorado: (where I live) Top Four proponents have over the past few months have filed 41 ballot initiative proposals; one remains # 188. The title has been set so only three hurdles to the ballot remain:
Approval of the petition format, a procedural issue.
Signature collection. This is not the first rodeo for the chief funder, Kent Thiry, former CEO of the Devita kidney dialysis company. He has backed successful Colorado ballot initiatives before, including one that established semi-open primaries in Colorado. Yes, he is trying to redo his own work.
Possible legal challenges.
Many of the filings were rejected for violating the one subject rule, however #188 includes both rounds.
What I plan to propose could be considered three separate subjects:
A state-run primary with four options for parties: open, semi-open, closed and do it yourself.
A first-round election if there are eight or more candidates.
A better voting system for the general election.If #188 passes I might talk to state legislators about my ideas. If Kent Thiry can redo Kent Thiry's work, why shouldn't I be able to redo Kent Thiry's work? Of course, I'm not Kent Thiry, nor do I have his money.
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In a previous post I said:
I should clarify what I am trying to do.
I want to propose an alternative to the nonpartisan Top four systems currently being promoted by the friends of independent candidates. This was also inspired by a 17-candidate mayoral election I recently voted in.It would work like this:
1, A state run party primary with four options for each party: open, semi-open, closed, or do it yourself.
2, If there eight or more candidates a round to narrow the field to five candidates.
3, A final round with a good voting system.Concerning the purpose of Round 1
(After the primary and before the general election. Does Round 1 need a spiffy, descriptive name? Open to suggestions.)Round 1 serves to narrow the field and give a publicity platform for third-party and unaffiliated candidates.
By advancing past Round 1 into the general election a third party or unaffiliated candidate gains political credibility and publicity. Very much like a 15th seed beating a 2 seed in in the NCAA basketball tournament.
The party friendly state run primaries, hopefully with low barriers to entry, also serve to generate publicity for third parties.
I am more interested (I have my prejudices) in promoting third parties, I suspect the leaders or the Top Four movement are more interested in promoting independent candidates.
I know all this would be expensive to the taxpayers. I believe that a fair and effective election system is worth the money, much like a good accounting system is worth the cost to a business.
Governments have a great deal of power and money; we need to put the voters in charge even if it is expensive.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Eliminating primaries would generate opposition and negative publicity.
Would it? I feel like people complain about the low turnout and cost of primaries all the time. I think it might actually be a big advantage.
@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Parties are inevitable in a democratic system, and serve important purposes. We need competition between more strong parties.
I definitely don't disagree! But typically other countries just handle this with some kind of election system that's (weakly) independent of clones, so everyone can run (including multiple candidates from the same party or faction).
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Both SPAV Sequential proportional approval voting and the Excess Method
The Excess Method: A Multiwinner Approval Voting Procedure to Allocate Wasted Votes
would work well in narrow down the field in large elections.SPAV is a lot easier to count and explain and should work quite well.
The Excess Method adds calculations after the election of each candidate to distribute the seat winning candidate's excess approvals. This will, at least in theory, better represent the will of the voters. With the Excess Method, voters could approve all the candidates they like with no concern for strategy or temptation to tactical vote.
A difficult decision. Do you have a dog in this race?
I'm not sure in practice how the results of the Excess Method would differ from SPAV, but I think its complexity counts against it. And considering this is just to narrow down the field, rather than get the best proportional result, I don't think it's probably necessary.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Governments have a great deal of power and money; we need to put the voters in charge even if it is expensive.
Agreeing in spades. Thank you for your activism.
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@toby-pereira said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
I'm not sure in practice how the results of the Excess Method would differ from SPAV, but I think its complexity counts against it. And considering this is just to narrow down the field, rather than get the best proportional result, I don't think it's probably necessary.
Thank you for the advice, your point is well taken.
For a Round 1 vote, I am leaning to a Webster version of SPAV and STAR for Round 2, the general election.
I saw that SPAV and STAR are listed as failing Participation on the Comparison of Electoral Systems wikipedia page.
Could those failures be a problem in these two applications?
Am I paying too much attention to the criterion lists? -
@lime said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
I feel like people complain about the low turnout and cost of primaries all the time. I think it might actually be a big advantage.
(regarding the elimination of primaries in a two round voting system generating helpful or harmful publicity)
You might be right, we should see how this goes in Top Four ballot initiative votes. There are plenty of folks who are tired of primaries, and primaries get a lot of blame these days. On the other side, political parties and their supporters may howl.
I want to give parties, especially third-parties, opportunities and options for how they choose their members and how they gain publicity.
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@gregw said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
@toby-pereira said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
I'm not sure in practice how the results of the Excess Method would differ from SPAV, but I think its complexity counts against it. And considering this is just to narrow down the field, rather than get the best proportional result, I don't think it's probably necessary.
Thank you for the advice, your point is well taken.
For a Round 1 vote, I am leaning to a Webster version of SPAV and STAR for Round 2, the general election.
I saw that SPAV and STAR are listed as failing Participation on the Comparison of Electoral Systems wikipedia page.
Could those failures be a problem in these two applications?
Am I paying too much attention to the criterion lists?Participation is a very difficult criterion to pass. SPAV fails it, but I think non-sequential PAV passes it. However, it might be computationally unfeasible, and probably not the best method for this particular application anyway. I think sequential PR methods pretty much all fail participation (apart from perhaps non-deterministic ones), so you might just have to accept it.
For the final round, score and approval both pass participation, so you could select one of them. Approval is generally considered a good method by most people, whether or not is it their absolute favourite.
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@toby-pereira
Thank you for your help.
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Notes:
- Exact PAV or Harmonic Voting are infeasible, but very good approximation is trivial—integer linear programming is hard in theory but easy in practice. (There are better approximation algorithms than SPAV/SPSV, so I'd argue these are obsolete except as educational tools.)
- I'm not actually sure proportional voting systems should satisfy affine invariance. Especially for the case of constant-sum invariance, it could be a negative property. I'm writing up the argument in another thread.
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Although, I will say SPAV with Jefferson is probably a better system for a primary than something like PAV, because a primary should always select the candidates with the most votes; the goal is to maximize the probability that the best candidate will make it to the runoff, rather than optimizing the average overall representativeness.
Also, I think SPAV is fairly simple, but might be too complicated for a simple primary compared to cumulative voting. (Also also, any Condorcet winner should probably be guaranteed a spot.)
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@lime said in The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs:
Although, I will say SPAV with Jefferson is probably a better system for a primary than something like PAV, because a primary should always select the candidates with the most votes; the goal is to maximize the probability that the best candidate will make it to the runoff, rather than optimizing the average overall representativeness.
Also, I think SPAV is fairly simple, but might be too complicated for a simple primary compared to cumulative voting. (Also also, any Condorcet winner should probably be guaranteed a spot.)Yes, the idea is to nominate the best candidate, average overall representativeness could result in a boring general election.
I think voters would like cumulative voting. There would be a slight possibility of a strategic block voting campaign. If a party had that enough support to pull that off they would probably win the general election in any event.
