41–50 of 52 posts
But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?
12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How…
FWIW, after living in an all-mail voting state (WA), I never want to go back to voting in person. It is amazing having a couple weeks to mark a ballot at my leisure, do as much research as I want, and then just drop it in a box (or mail it, I guess, but the drop boxes have definitely been more reliable for me). But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, after living in an all-mail voting state (WA), I never want to go back to voting in person. It is amazing having a couple weeks to mark a ballot at my leisure, do as much research as I want, and then just drop it in a box (or mail it, I guess, but the drop boxes have definitely been more reliable for me). But it's true I don't have a shrieking neighbor or brutal spouse to worry about.
serious question, how do you know your vote is counted and is not intercepted/counterfeited before that?
Then, suddenly, the weak security of the postal system will look dodgy.
When, as in the CA case, ballots roll in after the polls close and magically ALWAYS flip the decision the same direction, there will be Sudden Shock and Awe.
12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How…
Even when you use the digital voting machines it spits out a paper ballot that you deposit into the ballot box so the country already agrees with you. It's not security vs convenience it's security vs turnout. Our turnout is embarrassingly low, especially on non-presidential election years, we should be expending voting access to methods that have even less friction. If we can conduct banking via an app or website we…
Rest assured: any workable angle you can think of an many you have not have already been employed to cheat elections.
This is not a partisan dig; rather, simple reality.
12-year election officer here. This idea is great for small groups of informed voters. However, I submit that there are (at least) three other crucial discussions to have: - Does my status as an informed voter bias me toward a system for which I have done all the homework? - Does my script that works fine in my dev system with relatively clean test data scale to an enterprise deployment and real-world loading? - How…
This acronym needs to be more widely deployed.
It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.
Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others. And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to a…
utterly false.
https://www.rangevoting.org/HonStrat https://www.rangevoting.org/Honesty https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
> And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance
1. this is true of _every_ deterministic voting method. it's mathematically proven.
2. even approval voting is extremely accurate. see voter satisfaction efficiency calculations from harvard stats phd jameson quinn, who served with me on the board of the center for election science. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
> RCV isn't perfect, but in all but the smallest elections there's really no practical strategic voting considerations. You just state your true preference order.
ludicrous. IRV is extremely vulnerable to strategic voting. my aunt who voted biden even tho she preferred warren (to stop trump) would do the same thing with ranking: rank biden 1st to prevent warren from losing to trump.
something similar happened in the first alaska house special election. palin was a spoiler. she caused the democrat mary peltola to win, even tho fellow republican nick begich was preferred to peltola (and to palin) by a large majority. in other words, palins supporters hurt themselves by honestly ranking palin 1st. they would have been strategically better off burying palin and ranking begich 1st.
and the VSE metrics show that even 100% honest IRV performs worse than approval voting with all voters being strategic.
IRV is simply one of the worst voting methods in existence. not to mention being radically overcomplicated and opaque.
i'm sorry that you posted this before having even an inkling about how any of this works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. As the article mentions, in the real world score voting would just be approval voting where you put a max score on some choices and 0 on others. And in approval voting you need to think about how others will vote and pick your cutoff point based on who you think has a chance - do you vote "yes" for the center-right party to a…
> Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being vulnerable to strategic voting is a huge downside that outweighs other considerations. I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. None of the three satisfy the condorcet winner criterion (that is: none of them guarantee the winner would beat every other candidate head-to-head), but it seems less l…
> I disagree that strategic voting as a downside outweighs the downsides of RCV or FPTP - especially when FPTP itself is susceptible to strategic voting, too. To clarify, I never intended that as a defence of FPTP. It's awful and I'll take any of the systems being discussed here over it. It was a statement specifically towards IRV over score/approval.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
it's not even close.
The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise. Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win.…
Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the sam…
No, you don’t, if it’s a multimember proportional system, like STV. There are some multimember systems your concern applies to, like the “vote for N, top N win” at-large system used for some US city councils, school district boards, and similar bodies: those are simply means to have a multimember body while avoiding either diffuse or geographically-concentrated minorities from being represented. (And the prospect of that particular kind of multimember arrangement being used to neutralize the effect of black voting rights, specifically, is why multimember districts are prohibited by federal law in Congressional apportionment, currently.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system. But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the sam…
I'm really against mixed-member proportional (and pretty much all form of proportional representation) since you end up with party hacks unaccountable to voters. When parties control the order of the lists there is also really strong incentive by representatives to tow the party line to avoid relegation.
Candidate-centered proportional systems (e.g., single transferrable vote in moderately sized, 5-7 member, districts) do not have this problem of party-list/MMP systems, though they have somewhat less finely-grained partisan proportionality (limited by district rather than legislative body size.) OTOH, they are still potentially effectively more proportional because the general electorate preference for individual candidates captures more dimensions of both policy and non-policy preference than mere party preference captures.
It’s also possible to have the party lists being ranked by general electorate preference (especially in MMP, rather than full-body party list PR, because in MMP the list is only used for top-up seats which requires smaller, more manageable lists.)