I am in touch with a group of people who think they are working on a platform for a national-level political party (I am a full voting member). They have heard of STAR and are acquainted with one or two people whose opinions they respect who favor STAR. I think I have convinced them that the platform should not call for a single voting system for all uses, on the grounds that circumstances differ and that State parties should decide based on the circumstances. The draft provisions being passed around in the group tend to mention more than one voting system. But, I want to convince them not to include any favorable mention of RCV/IRV whatsoever. What is the most convincing argument I can take to them that the risk of a spoiler effect is too high with IRV?

Thanks for pointing out that omission. The info has been available via published minutes of the forum council, but it's better to have a summary in the present category (which is whither the "About" button on the home page leads), so I posted it.

Here is a ranking of forms of expression by expressivity:

• Least expressive: strict ranking.
• Middlingly expressive: ranking allowing equal-ranking.
• Most expressive: ratio scale.

Every Tuesday, at 20:00 New York time (16:00 UTC), @Sass answers questions on voting systems at bit.ly/democracy-discussions

I see no low-cost, no-risk solution to a question regarding control of this domain name in case someone dies or otherwise becomes incapacitated. The domain registrar firm understands a relationship with an individual, and maybe a legal entity could be substituted for the individual. But as far as I know, creating a legal entity requires paying a lawyer, and I am unwilling to do that. But the current situation is that so far as the domain registrar firm is concerned, a single human individual owns this domain name. That individual has a credit card, the registrar is able to charge this credit card, and will do so if someone who knows the password orders more services. I am sure it is no surprise to any of you that I am that individual. With no arrangements in place other than these, the forum users bear a risk that I die from CoVid19 or getting run over by a truck or whatever (I am almost 70), and no one renews the domain, and so it expires, which would lead to the forum going under. So a possible solution is I could place trust in several of you to control the domain, and tell you the password, but then I would be effectively putting people I don't really know all that well in a position where they could hit my credit card. I suppose I could make some of you the executors of my estate in my last will and testament. Then you'd have to show the domain registrar your letters testamentary so you could take control of the account. I don't know whether the firm would respond in a timely fashion to such a communication.

The _equalvote.org_ organization has decided to accept this discussion forum as a partner organization. They are a legal entity (I guess) and so the obvious solution would be to transfer the domain name to their control. Then if whoever is in control of the server (again, that is currently I) become unresponsive and someone else has a backup and wants to bring up a new server with the data and code, they can just e'splain that to equalvote.org and it can point the domain name to the new server. I guess I would like to see some statement by active users of the forum that they are willing to trust equalvote.org to that degree, if that is going to be the solution.

@rob @paretoman @Casimir @Andy-Dienes @last19digitsofpi @masiarek @culi @rb-j @marcosb @BTernaryTau @BetterVoting @frenzed @Keith-Edmonds @Toby-Pereira @wolftune @Ted-Stern @wbport @multi_system_fan @Psephomancy @robertpdx @tec @Essenzia

@rob said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

I think most of the general public in the US just calls it "voting".

I agree. I think it doesn't occur to most US people that more than one way to vote would be possible, and so it doesn't enter their mind to have a term for the way they do it as to be distinguished from possible other ways.

In one of the antisocial media, when I mentioned some alternative system, someone responded that that would be fake voting.

I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives". I put those terms in quotes because I am referring to people using those terms. I do not know what the users of those terms think the "conservatives" want to conserve or what the "liberals" want to liberate. I would use the terms without horror quotes if I stood ready to answer those questions should you ask them of me.

@Toby-Pereira Maybe I can get them with a limited form of screen scraping.

Or maybe @SaraWolk can prevail upon CES to give us the images. I have no sway to even get CES to acknowledge receipt of a message. While she is at it, she could also ask them for an updated dump of the other data, or just the items added or changed since they sent us the dump they sent.

The first image in that post, on the original site (implemented with Discourse) is rendered with a document element as the following HTML would specify:

<img src="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png" alt="Voters" data-base62-sha1="tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp" class="d-lazyload" srcset="https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_577x499.png, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/optimized/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33_2_865x748.png 1.5x, https://forum.electionscience.org/uploads/default/original/1X/cf86b73999447d4ed4ca89c8029dac48835e5a33.png 2x" width="577" height="499">

The reference to it in the data dump that we received from CES and on which I base the archive, looks like this:

<img src="upload://tBRsJE42NBx6MHq3EKBgNtMIsHp.png" alt="Voters|577x499">

upload: is not a legal scheme for use in a URI. Discourse is parsing it and substituting the long version as above.

Maybe in exchange for an annual monetary tribute, CES would be willing to keep the original site up.

Two places to look (unrelated to one another (so far)):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_Voting_Party

• https://www.guilded.gg/United-Peoples-Assembly/groups/l3GWYRK3/channels/9c6545c7-15e9-4e59-8173-e86a6375807a/forums/1808331575

The second link requires admission, but admission will probably be forthcoming. This is United People's Assembly, a group of people still debating what formal mandate to take on, but I think the general opinion is in favor of parties in every State, forming a new one and/or working with existing ones, plus in one sense or another a national organization to help make all that work together. The national organization could qualify as a party under FEC rules after sufficient count of State parties agree to make coalition at the national level. Much of the spearheading is coming from Washington (the State, not DC).

In regard to the Green Party of the USA, I have experience that convinces me they are stuck on IRV and laugh at the idea that there is anything wrong with it.

I want to put code up that can run in a browser to simulate elections. A peripheral question I am struggling with concerns how from the user's viewpoint to set up the volatile memory of the parameter values.

I say volatile memory, because at this point I am not planning to tackle allowing people to register and log in so they could store values on the server. So I want to allow that you could fill in form widgets to set up the values you want for the parameters of the simulation, and those would be there in front of you, so long as you didn't navigate to another website. I want to make an encoding of the parameter values available as text that you could copy out and paste somewhere else to save.

It should be possible to load the volatile memory with a set of preset values from the server; those would be constant for a given version of the server.

It should be possible to clear out the parameter values and start over.

It should be possible to edit the volatile memory of the parameters.

So, a question I have is of whether to provide a way that the user could access several named slots in the volatile memory, each slot to have a complete assignment of values to parameters. The alternative would be to just have a single slot.

Why would you expect voters to change their answer between the pre-iteration round and the first focused round?

@cfrank Consider a score system with a range of 0 through 5 by 1. Giving Harris a 1 would raise her chances of beating, say, Stein, who gets a 5 from me.

@cfrank I honestly think that Trump and Harris deserve prison for life for supporting the killing of 17,000 Arab children. In a rating system, they both deserve the bottom rate. But on the ranking side, I would put Harris above Trump, because of his domestic fascist tendencies. Coupling would prevent honesty.

I suspect that the tightness of coupling between the rating part and the ranking part is a problem with these schemes. The first ballot should have separate sections (or "races" in the terms of bettervoting.com) for rating and ranking, if we want the absolute peak of accuracy.

Or how about use the Score winner as one finalist, and the Minimax winner as the other.

So, to make a more concrete proposal for how to narrow the field to two finalists, we could say collect Score-style five-star ballots, and present the Score winner as one finalist, and do something like Copeland to get the other finalist, who would be the calculated Condorcet winner if there is one, and would be otherwise pretty good as determined by Copeland-like techniques in the absence of a Condorcet winner.

A real runoff is not complex to understand, at least in principle. Do you think that actually running one could produce a more accurate result than would be produced by the best of systems (like approval-seeded Llull, for example) that perform "instant" runoff rounds of tallying, but do not require the voters to return for a second polling?

How large? What would be a good name for the resulting system? Would it address your original concerns equally so well as a second polling would?

Approval-seeded Llull:

Ballots: voters classify each candidate as good or bad, and within each of those classes, they rank the candidates, with equal ranking permitted.

Tally:

First, the tally orders the candidates by how many "good" classifications they got from the voters. The candidate that got the most goes at the top.

Next, the tally compares the bottom two candidates on the list with regard to how many voters ranked one over the other minus how many ranked them in the opposite order. The loser of this comparison is stricken from the list.

The tally repeats the bottom-two comparisons until only one candidate remains; this is the winner.

Discussion:

Approval-seeded Llull is an hybrid rating-ranking system. The rankings are less tightly coupled to the ratings, as compared to how tightly they are coupled in STAR.

Why this might solve the problems you bring up:

There is no incentive to warp the ranking aspect for a strategic motivation coming from the rating aspect of the tally, nor vice versa (maybe?).

Example application to a real political controversy: Consider the 2024 US Presidential election. A voter would not have to classify Ms. Harris as "good" to rank her over Mr. Trump. They could receive the same rating but different rankings. Trump would have been less likely to win, I think, than he would have under STAR, because with STAR, voters who could not bring themselves to give Harris even a 1, on the grounds that she supports the elimination of every Arab in Gaza, would thereby be forced into not ranking her above Trump.

Do you think that Approval-seeded Llull adequately addresses the concern?

Inability to comment seems to be a new problem. It didn't restrict me when I first started using it, even as an ordinary user separate from the initial admin accounts.