Toward A Second Vote On Voting Systems

Jack Waugh

I suggest a list of steps:

ask who is interested in participating in the subsequent steps. People can answer "yes" or "no" and that may be valuable information.
if someone observes that, in the opinion of the someone, sufficient count of people have responded "yes" to the above to merit going on to the next step, that someone can so announce.
discussion of motivations for a vote
discussion of ground rules (e. g., whoever nominates a voting system is committing to tally in it, what categories are we going to have, timeline for next steps)
attempt to recruit participants who haven't up to now been active here (e. g. from other fora on this topic)? If agreed in discussion of ground rules mentioned above.
nominations
vote
tallying

Jack Waugh

I am hereby begging all readers to come here to this thread and promise to participate in a vote on voting systems for the single-winner case. And to promise to participate in discussions beforehand about how the vote should go. In fact, I think we should debate motions concerning that and vote on the motions. I'm asking you to promise to vote on the motions. I'm asking for your explicit promise to post explicit votes on the motions.

Here's what I now consider to be the main reason we should do this. We who think about voting systems, including thinkers who have been frequenting other fora instead of this one, all of us together, need to pick a consensus winner among single-winner voting systems to push above all others when we communicate to the public about political elections. Otherwise, the officials who could help advance our cause, the newspaper reporters who even give any notice to it, and the builders of voting machinery are likely to continue to believe we have no consensus and they are likely to continue to wait for one, as @SaraWolk has pointed out.

Can we build, among as many as possible of those who already think about voting systems or advocate for better ones, can we build among them (us) an agreement for a vote on voting systems so we can show consensus and open the way for actual progress in establishing democracy in place of the current regime in the US?

Let's get several onboard from this forum and then start recruiting from the other ones.

Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! Heiaha!

GregW

@jack-waugh

I agree with you and @SaraWolk concerning the need.
I am willing to participate although my expertise is limited to issues of salability.

cfrank

@jack-waugh I think it would be best to have a multifaceted vote on voting systems. Here is the ballot format I suggest, since it can be flexibly transformed into ballots that are compatible with other systems.

Once the candidate voting systems under consideration are chosen, each voter should submit a ballot assigning each candidate an independent integer score ranging from 0 to 100. For scaling purposes, two pseudo-candidates who cannot win will be introduced to the election as well, one automatically receiving a 0 on every ballot, and the other automatically receiving a 100 on every ballot. Each voter will also submit an integer from 0 to 100 as their approval threshold, and scores above that threshold will count as an approval.

This way, we can examine the winner under various different systems using self-consistent ballots. We can also see which voting systems if any end up electing themselves, just for curiosity.

If the election gets organized well, I’ll participate.

multi_system_fan

Good ideas!
There should be relatively long times between steps since many contributers don't look everyday on this forum.

I propose a dodgson-hare synthesis method that I really like.
It' described in a good article : http://jamesgreenarmytage.com/dodgson.pdf with this abstract:
In 1876, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proposed a committee election procedure that chooses the Condorcet winner when one exists, and otherwise eliminates candidates outside the Smith set, then allows for re-votes until a Condorcet winner emerges. The present paper discusses Dodgson’s work in the context of strategic election behavior and suggests a “Dodgson-Hare” method: a variation on Dodgson’s procedure for use in public elections, which allows for candidate withdrawal and employs Hare’s plurality-loser-elimination method to resolve the most persistent cycles. Given plausible (but not unassailable) assumptions about how candidates decide to withdraw in the case of a cycle, Dodgson-Hare outperforms Hare, Condorcet-Hare, and 12 other voting rules in a series of spatial-model simulations which count how often each rule is vulnerable to coalitional manipulation. In the special case of a one-dimensional spatial model, all coalitional voting strategies that are possible under Condorcet-Hare can be undone in Dodgson-Hare, by the withdrawal of candidates who have incentive to withdraw.

Since we are not electing individuals but a method and a method cannot withdraw itself based on informed understanding - which is essential for the high strategy-resistance of this method - an modification seems necessary. For instance: everyone get's to nominate 1 method and can withdraw this method when there's a cycle. Perhaps a few times new additions can be allowed.

Jack Waugh

For discussion: How sċeal wē recruit participants in the nominating and voting from the mailing list, the Reddit forum, any other fora on this topic about which you may know? Sċeal wē avoid requiring them to join the present forum, but instead tell them that they can nominate and vote in the fora they are already in, and that wē commit ourselves to scan those fora and copy the nominations and votes over to here? I guess I don't mind doing that work, but wē have to be clear with ourselves and others in setting deadlines.

Motion: Whoever nominates a voting system commits to tally the metaelection in that system, and show her or his work in doing so. Can I get a second?

GregW

@jack-waugh said in Toward A Second Vote On Voting Systems:

We who think about voting systems, including thinkers who have been frequenting other fora instead of this one, all of us together, need to pick a consensus winner among single-winner voting systems to push above all others when we communicate to the public about political elections. Otherwise, the officials who could help advance our cause, the newspaper reporters who even give any notice to it, and the builders of voting machinery are likely to continue to believe we have no consensus and they are likely to continue to wait for one

Those of use who think about voting systems have two things in common with reporters and voting machine manufactures; elected officeholders are our distributors and voters are our end users.

If we can persuade elected officeholders, or voters via ballot initiative, on the merits of a particular voting system; voting machine manufacturers will have a strong incentive to go along.

The support of reporters and/or voting manufacturers would help when lobbying elected officeholders and persuading voters.

Also, advocates of election reform, like myself, might be inclined to promote a voting system recommended by this election and use the recommendation as evidence of value of that voting system.

Toby Pereira

I know some of you will have seen that on EM, there has just been a poll of single-winner systems. Ranked Pairs with winning votes won the poll as the Condorcet winner and most approved. The margins version of Ranked Pairs wasn't in the poll though, so they weren't compared. See here and here for a breakdown.