@tec referenda are interesting as an example, I would say they are more efficient in a sense, but the cost of that can be coherency. For example, referenda in California have led to incoherent policies, because the public often wants to have its cake and eat it too: the public wants service X, but simultaneously doesn’t want to pay for it, so they vote for X but also vote against tax increases that would pay for X. This effectively forces the government to borrow to reconcile public demands, which leads to debt that the public also doesn’t want.

The government then gets criticized for borrowing, but in a sense, that is misplaced responsibility—the direct translation of an incoherent set of policies is the source of the issue, and borrowing is a symptom. This shows that representatives also serve the role of taking on coherent responsibility for coherent policy decisions, but citizens’ policy referenda can undermine that role in the kind of situation I described. Probably, the effects of this kind are less severe or even negligible in smaller, more internally cohesive populations like in Switzerland.

Feedback is absolutely necessary, and structural issues as you indicate are major obstacles. If SAVE is a policy proposal generator, it seems to serve the role of a structured public forum. Is that accurate in your view? It seems like a more democratized form of a special interest group. How would the interests become translated into policy?

@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

... So then shouldn't we be encouraging voters to give preferences as close to honesty as possible, to make sure we have as little error as possible?

No, in my opinion, we shouldn't. That's asking them to play the sucker, in the presence of a voting system that can get, I think, the right answer in case no party plays sucker. The proper use of Score Voting is to apply a tactic to maximize the expected value of the outcome. And I doubt whether STAR behaves significantly differently. It's just extra complexity for no gain.

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

"Honest voting" is a theoretical concept that can be useful in thought experiments and reasoning and the design of algorithms, etc. However, it does not describe a phenomenon that can happen in real elections in which something important rides on the outcome of the tally.

$20 says it does.

How are we going to test that? With the voters experiencing how many elections where the outcome matters to them? And how are we going to measure the importance of an election?

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

What grounds do you have for coming to such an opinion? I don't think it is correct.

I think that's just the definition of the "best result" under a given metric. Regardless of what social welfare function you pick, that social welfare function will be maximized if voters are honest.

What do you care about? Electing majority winners? A Condorcet method will always elect a Condorcet winner if voters are honest (but not necessarily if they're dishonest). Maximizing social utility? Score voting does that with honest voters (but not always for dishonest voters). Maximizing the number of voters who see their favorite candidate elected? FPP does that with honest voters (but once again, can't with dishonest ones).

No matter which social welfare function you come up with, that social welfare function will do better at its job if it has accurate information than if it has inaccurate information.

The input doesn't have to be accurate information about what the voters want. It suffices, in the case of Score Voting, if it is accurate information about the voter's tactical choice. If just one side votes "honestly" and the other is trying to maximize value, the result will be wrong and will skew to the side that is using the tactic. However, I contend that when all sides are using their respective best tactic, the "pull" balances out and the result will be the same as though all were "honest". The reason to think this is that the system is additive and balanced.

To paraphrase WDS: consider a voting system in which a vote consists of 32 bits. The tally takes the XOR of the ballots and then takes the result modulo the count of candidates to get the index of the winning candidate. How do I cast an "honest" vote in this system?

@brozai Bear in mind that this was one of the systems used to choose Allocated Score so getting the same result is not a surprise. Also, SSS performed equivalently from my recollection. Allocated Score was chosen because there was some intuition that it was better than SSS in terms of strategy.

@Jack-Waugh I mean that partisan voters will rank their candidate first and the main opposition last. So one (or both?) of the top contenders is likely to be eliminated early.

@robertpdx said in Vote for 2 then Instant Runoff:

"Vote for 2" is a standard, well-accepted method for choosing two winners. And a runoff is the standard, well-accepted method for deciding between two candidates. So I propose to combine those two steps into a single election.

Right, well, that's an interesting point. If Vote for 2 then Instant Runoff can be sold to Joe Sixpack on account of its being based on well-accepted methods, but Approval cannot, because it is novel, then getting something better than FPtP/IRV in place may be better than nothing, in helping to replace the omnicidal regime with a people's regime.