The Alaskan Top Four Model & iEBs
-
@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).
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@toby-pereira
Thank you for your help.
-
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.
-
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.)
-
@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.
