Cumulative voting: more popular in corporations than in politics
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It appears that cumulative voting is more popular for proportional representation in corporate elections to fill seats in boards of directors but not particularly popular for political use or among voting reform advocates. Why is that? In particular, cumulative voting for boards of directors is mandated by some state laws, yet it looks like those same states do not require cumulative voting for their own legislative branch. For example, Alaska makes cumulative voting the default for boards of directors, but its own legislative branch uses single-winner districts; as another example, Arizona requires cumulative voting for boards of directors but uses multi-winner plurality for its house of representatives.
In the US, cumulative voting has been used historically in some municipalities and in Illinois for 120 years until its repeal, and it has been mandated by courts as a remediation for National Voting Rights Act issues, but it seems unpopular among voting reform advocates. Why do voting reform advocates pass it by for more complex systems? Could this not be a simple, workable compromise similar to how approval voting is often seen as a workable compromise for single-seat election reform?
Are the problems with cumulative voting too great for it to be effective in practice? From what I have read, some places repealed it due to gridlock caused by minority representation, but representation of minority interests to oppose the majority seems to be rather a point in its favor.
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@k98kurz cumulative voting fails independence of clones, which in my opinion is a pretty crucial criterion to satisfy. I think it’s strange that it should be mandated by any law. As far as popularity in business contexts outside of mandates, those are private enterprises that can do what they like internally, and while I think they could certainly vote in better ways, my view is that it isn’t much of a public concern.
My opinion on the method is actually that it isn’t really superior to choose-one(plurality). I think from a criteria standpoint, it doesn’t distinguish itself from choose-one(plurality) much at all, except that it also fails later no harm. So in that sense it may even be worse but I don’t know, I wonder what others think. I don’t think it really has redeeming qualities, I may be wrong. But in my view, it basically tries and fails to be approval voting.
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@k98kurz Cumulative voting for committees is very like single non-transferable vote (and First Past the Post for single-winner). As said, it fails independence of clones, and it requires much more precision strategic voting to get any sort of sensible result.
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@toby-pereira it makes sense that it has more merit in multi-winner elections. But single transferable vote would be much better.
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@k98kurz I think the issues that lead to repeal, were related to it's use with small district magnitude, not any attributes of cumulative voting itself. With two seats per district and everything else discouraging the establishment of a third party, the seats end up evenly divided between the two parties unless there is a huge difference in the amount of votes each receives.
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@cfrank the main issue with STV is that it is fairly complex, making it somewhat challenging to implement and also to follow the algorithmic logic with any real detail. I read through the ballot tallying report for an Australian Senate election a few years back, and it was awful and tedious -- iirc it was over 60 pages long. By comparison, a cumulative vote tallying report would just be one page of numbers.
It seems that MMP is a much simpler and easier method than STV that gives reasonable results. (Whether the official inclusion of parties is a problem or not is philosophical speculation considering that political parties exist in reality, but that is a separate matter.) Are there any other methods for proportional representation that are simple enough to be both practical and easily comprehensible to concerned citizens?
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@k98kurz said in Cumulative voting: more popular in corporations than in politics:
@cfrank the main issue with STV is that it is fairly complex, making it somewhat challenging to implement and also to follow the algorithmic logic with any real detail. I read through the ballot tallying report for an Australian Senate election a few years back, and it was awful and tedious -- iirc it was over 60 pages long. By comparison, a cumulative vote tallying report would just be one page of numbers.
It seems that MMP is a much simpler and easier method than STV that gives reasonable results. (Whether the official inclusion of parties is a problem or not is philosophical speculation considering that political parties exist in reality, but that is a separate matter.) Are there any other methods for proportional representation that are simple enough to be both practical and easily comprehensible to concerned citizens?
Proportional methods tend to just be more complex by their nature. But if you allow them to be non-deterministic then that goes away. E.g. COWPEA Lottery which uses approval ballots. Or if you have a region that elects, say, 6 candidates, voters just rank their top 6 candidates. Then you consecutively pick six ballots at random and elect the unelected candidate that is highest ranked on that ballot.
This type of method, while it doesn't guarantee a very proportional result in each region, would actually give better proportionality nationally than deterministic methods that use these smallish regions (like STV), and they also keep the election candidate-based, which other nationally proportional methods tend not to.
Random ballot with just one representative per region guarantees that honest voting is the best strategy, but I tend to think that it becomes too lotteristic at that point. With e.g. five or six chances to be elected (as in the above methods), particularly popular candidates would not be on such a knife-edge of being elected.
I also think that non-deterministic methods send out a good message - that there are no "safe seats", and that representing the electorate is a privilege and not some guaranteed right.
So while non-deterministic methods might be a tough sell, I personally prefer them for national parliaments.
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@toby-pereira very interesting. Many ancient cultures employed sortition for allocating responsibilities or making decisions, though perhaps this will be a more difficult sell without the appeal to "the will of the gods" becoming rhetorically effective again.