Advocacy Tailored to Location
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I'm suggesting this strategy for changing the laws around single-winner elections:
for a given locality, if they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, then promote Score{1, .99, .01, 0} else promote Approval.
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For non-equally-spaced Score schemes, I'm suggesting the following system of letter grades:
- A = 1
- B = .99
- C = .9
- D = .5
- E = .1
- F = .01
- G = 0
A system omitting C, D, and E would use letter grades ABFG. The middle letters would be reserved for possible expansion of the system for if people complained that it had insufficiently fine granularity.
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@Jack-Waugh said in Advocacy Tailored to Location:
for a given locality, if they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, then promote Score{1, .99, .01, 0} else promote Approval.
Without detracting from your goals here, I think it is worth considering a much smaller incremental change for places that already have IRV, which nonetheless solves significant problems and improves outcomes of elections.
The IRV halting condition is: “If one of the remaining candidates has more than half of the remaining votes, they win.”
That could be modified to: “If one of the remaining candidates would defeat all of the others head-to-head, they win.”
This small change turns IRV into not only a Condorcet method, but in fact a Smith method. The winner is guaranteed to be in the topologically highest strongly-connected-component of the pairwise results graph.
From an advocacy and education perspective, I suggest using the term “clear winner” in place of “Condorcet winner”. Then the new halting condition can be expressed succinctly as, “If one of the remaining candidates is a clear winner, they win.”
This phrasing also makes it easier to explain the problem being solved: the standard IRV method can fail to elect a clear winner. With this change to the halting condition, we can guarantee that won’t happen.
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@NevinBR, where I said "they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV", I should have said "they have already taken on the expense of the logistics of IRV, but have repealed IRV."
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I'm becoming more and more convinced that people can't be convinced that Approval is expressive enough. I think it probably is, but it's extremely hard to get across. And I am not 100% sure that Approval is really as expressive as I have been arguing that it is. Maybe there is a hole in the argument that I have been advancing. So I'm thinking we should advocate for Score with finer granularity in the single-winner cases, unless the local activists argue that it's just a nonstarter logistically. How about using a range with seven values? I suspect that spacing them according to a logistic function would work best strategically, but that's impossible to explain to people, so how about seven values equally spaced then?