@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:

The Supreme Court of Maine has once again ruled on the constitutionality of Ranked Choice Voting, again finding it to be unconstitutional.

In 2017 they had ruled that RCV was not compatible with Maine's requirement for a Plurality winner (the candidate with the most votes wins). In RCV, ballots are initially counted as votes for first-choice candidates, but those same votes can later be transferred or discarded, meaning the final winner may not be the candidate who received the most votes as originally cast.

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It's worth noting that STAR Voting and Approval Voting both comply with the Maine Constitution's plurality winner rule. STAR Voting only finds the Plurality winner once, in the Automatic Runoff round. It clearly defines the vote as the runoff vote and defines scores as ballot data - not votes. Votes are never reassigned, transferred, or exhausted. Your vote goes to the finalist you prefer or counts as equal support for both, essentially like an abstain between those two. The candidate with the most votes wins.

This seems slightly tenuous. I don't think we can go by how STAR defines itself by saying that only the runoff is "the vote". Otherwise IRV / RCV could just redefine itself to declare that only the final runoff is "the vote".

The point is that it's surely about how this supreme court defines a vote, not how an individual voting method does.

@sarawolk said in Allocated score (STAR-PR) centrist clones concern:

In any case, I think that Clones are a much bigger problem in hypothetical math scenarios than they ever will be in real life campaigns, and if a faction can really pull off running 2 or 3 clones that all break through and win over voters then that's frankly impressive. The reality is that if voter behavior doesn't do them in, limitations in campaign funding and volunteer power likely will.

I'm not sure I really see this as a problem of clones specifically. If parties exist, then it's fairly normal for parties to field several candidates in a multi-winner election.

But I do think the particular voting behaviour in the example election is a bit "edge case", although it's still best to avoid vulnerability to it.

@wolftune There is this thread from 2024. I think it might have passed me by at the time. I see your point about it being clearer about what it does, but on the other hand, it's not something I've really thought about, so I don't think I will suddenly change my language immediately based on this. It's quite a big thing to do, and I think I would need to see that there is a larger consensus in the general voting community that this is the best name, rather than just individuals deciding one at a time.

Edit - Thinking about it, "Choose-any" comes across as ambiguous to me. It could come across as "choose any one".

While people aren't likely to cast votes that are perfectly related to utility, I still see scores as more akin to utility than to something like money, where the increase in utility drops off the higher up the scale you go.

So what I'm saying is that I see a 5 and a 0 as in the same ballpark as a 3 and a 2, rather than the 3 and 2 being preferable for equity reasons.

How good score voting is generally is a separate debate obviously, but where it gives the same tie as a pairwise method, I don't see any reason in principle to prefer one result over another. But as a tie-break, it's probably fine to choose the result you might consider less divisive.

An interesting follow-up question would be whether you would consider divisiveness over score where there isn't an exact score tie (but is a pairwise tie still) or whether it's only useful as a tie-breaker. You could, for example, reduce C's score of 3 to 2. That way, the pairwise result is still a tie but on average scores, A and B are now marginally ahead of C despite being more divisive. Is there still an argument to elect C?

@cfrank I've seen a few as well which I've deleted, but they're not overwhelming the board or anything, so I wouldn't want to make anything worse for any new users we might get, which isn't that many anyway! So I'd probably say leave it for now, but keep an eye on the situation.

I suppose he's used that assumption because a hereditary monarch is essentially a leader arbitrarily picked, like in random winner (as opposed to random ballot). But this is obviously very simplistic. When you have an all-powerful monarch versus some other system, the entire political and cultural landscape is likely to be very different and that isn't modelled by this.

Well, it partly depends on what you do with equal ranks or incomplete ballots. If an unranked candidate is scored as 0 then a 4-3-2-1 system would be different from 3-2-1-0. But if it's done in a more sensible way, they would be equivalent.

@jack-waugh Right, I see. Though I think it's no better or worse than what I thought it was. Just arbitrarily favouring voters who approve a particular number of candidates. And it encourages putting up clones or non-entities accordingly.

@multi_system_fan It's quite interesting, although allowing more than one round of voting changes things quite a lot, and there are probably also other alternatives that might be as good or better.

I don't think you could apply it to the metric being considered in this thread though.

@cfrank Can you explicitly explain this method, rather than making us infer it from a related Wikipedia article?

@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

@clay I read through most of your manifesto

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I did also read through most of it, even if I did miss one or two things!

@clay said in Merits and Demerits of Compulsory Voting:

@toby-pereira no if you want to understand it it's best for you to read the manifesto.

In any case, if they're not in a bubble, they will still be exposed to biased media.

so are normal voters.

you have not stated a better system.

On reading the manifesto, I would still need to think this is something I might agree with to read it all, because I'm not going to read everyone's manifesto on everything. While I got the bubble bit wrong, I think I largely have a basic understanding of it in any case, especially after you corrected me.

Yes, normal voters are exposed to biased media too, but this suggests that the difference between jurors and normal voters might not be so great.

It has to be better than the default current system where everyone gets to vote. It's not about suggesting another alternative. There may be some ways in which the jury system would produce better results, and I can see that, but for this to get traction, it would have to be considerably better and seen to be so, in order to offset the view that this would eliminate most people's democratic rights.

In your piece about the only voting reform worth funding that was posted on this forum the other day, you pointed out that it's not about the best method. "It’s a function of which method gets adopted, times how much better off people are when it does."

So I think approval voting, but allowing everyone to vote seems a better option overall.

@clay I kind of read through it, but might have missed some. But to be honest, it is best to summarise stuff that's that long if you want it discussed on a forum.

In any case, if they're not in a bubble, they will still be exposed to biased media. And the candidates alone in a combative setting likely won't provide the best-rounded view of the candidates. I also don't think the way court systems operate is necessarily the best way to find the objective truth.

I'm not convinced this is the best system.

@clay

The jury model recognizes that competence isn't merely an inherent quality but can be dramatically enhanced through proper process and information environment. The election by jury approach transforms ordinary citizens into competent decision-makers by providing:

Protected time for learning and consideration, free from work and daily responsibilities

Access to comprehensive, balanced information about candidates and issues from multiple perspectives

Expert testimony and direct questioning of candidates

Structured deliberation with diverse peers that enhances critical thinking

A controlled environment that protects jurors from external influence and manipulation

This might sound good in theory, but in practice, how long are you going to keep these jurors in a bubble for, free from biased media etc.?

And who decides what counts as balanced information about the candidates?

@clay Some interesting stuff there. It's been said that score suffers worse with one-sided strategy than other methods. That is - if the supporters of one candidate strategise more than the supporters of another, then the result will be more skewed (favour the strategisers) under score than some other methods. Would you agree with that, and do you see it as a problem?

I think the argument is that it gives a more representative parliament and helps fight against voter apathy.

But I'm not sure I buy this. If people are only voting because they have to, the extra votes will come more from people who don't feel they have anything invested in any of the candidates winning, so the extra votes are more likely to be "noise".

Also, voter apathy is a thing. It's a worry that people don't feel engaged with the political system, and aren't moved to vote for any of the candidates. By forcing people to vote, you're simply hiding that. Knowing that only x % of people vote in an election should be a alarm bell to try and engage these potential voters. But if you force people to vote, you don't know how many of them are just voting under duress.

@jan This sounds like it could get complicated. However, it doesn't need to be. If everyone is bringing 10 games each, I don't think there needs to be a vote on that at all. People just bring the games that they want to. Essentially everyone gets 10 nominations into the pool that you vote on.

It might be the case that one person's favourite game is owned by someone else, but they can easily ask to borrow it for their own 10.

As for what to play, if you are playing a lot of games, I would prefer some sort of proportional system rather than a simple single-winner type vote each time. E.g. If 3 out of 5 players generally prefer one type of game and 2 prefer another type, it makes sense for there to be a 3:2 split rather than the 3 choosing every time.

You could simply take it in turns to choose. Alternatively I would recommend a lottery method, so that you would get proportional representation over the long haul without having to keep track of what has already happened. I think simple random ballot, where you randomly pick who chooses each game, would be inferior to taking turns. Some people would get to choose more, just by luck.

But one alternative, which has a balance between randomness and consensus is COWPEA Lottery. Each person approves as many games as they want. Then you pick a ballot at random and if that ballot lists more than one game, you just pick other ballots at random as a tie-break. So if the next ballot approves all or none of the remaining games in contention, you ignore it. Otherwise you eliminate games not approved. Continue until one game is left. If there is still a tie after all ballots have been picked, just pick at random among the remaining games.

@cfrank Yes, but "choose-any" was selected on the basis of being clear (it rolls off the tongue less well than "approval" I'd say), so it really needs to do that job perfectly before we get on to how well it rolls off the tongue.

Edit - I'd say "choose any number" is a little bit less clunky than "choose however many", but neither are great in that respect.

@wolftune There is this thread from 2024. I think it might have passed me by at the time. I see your point about it being clearer about what it does, but on the other hand, it's not something I've really thought about, so I don't think I will suddenly change my language immediately based on this. It's quite a big thing to do, and I think I would need to see that there is a larger consensus in the general voting community that this is the best name, rather than just individuals deciding one at a time.

Edit - Thinking about it, "Choose-any" comes across as ambiguous to me. It could come across as "choose any one".

I think it's fine to have it here, but being a US-specific thing, I probably don't have much to say on it!