There are several simulations to measure the accuracy of voting methods as Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (see Quinn, Huang). But increased accuracy comes with a cost in complexity. The most advanced Condorcet method may have a hard time being adopted in the real world. If we could measure how complex (or simple) a method is, then we could plot simplicity against accuracy and see which methods are on the Pareto-Front (see image)¹. In this case I subjectively ordered the methods by complexity. For the VSE I use the strategic result from Huang's simulation². Please view this graphic only as a mock-up for how it might look like with proper data.

¹ BTR-score is my rebranding of Smith//score as Bottom-two-runoff.

² I'm using the data by Huang, because it includes some important methods I want to talk about, that are not included by Quinn. If I were to use the average of honest, strategic and 1-sided votes, than approval, STAR and BTR-score would be on the Pareto-Front (with MJ performing surprisingly well).

Complexity could be measured as Kolmogorov-complexity, which is the length of the shortest program to describe a method. Obviously the depends a lot on who writes it. So the idea is that we define a programing language (e.g. Python) and some general conditions. E.g. given ballot data in a standardized csv-format, the program should output the winner, winning votes or points (or whatever metric is used), invalid votes and so on. Then set up a public repository and allow everyone to submit a shorter version of a program when they found one.

I have to little programming experience to formulate and set up such a standard. This is just a suggestion for anyone to take up. I may try if absolutely no one else is interested, but then it will be messy. Maybe someone has a better idea, or an idea on how to have the results without the need for this.

https://preview.redd.it/6xpoeexqnuvc1.png?width=960&format=png&auto=webp&s=375e26a7262c4feb51fd448bc6c4a83abc1918cd

Excerpts from Steffen Ganghof's "Beyond presidentialism and Parliamentarism"

A more complex but potentially fairer option would be a modified alternative vote (AV) system (Ganghof 2016a). In this system, voters can rank as many party lists as they like in order of preference and thereby determine the two parties with the greatest support. The parties with the least first-place votes are iteratively eliminated, and their votes transferred to each voter’s second-most preferred party, third-most preferred party, and so on. In contrast with a normal AV system, the process does not stop when one party has received more than 50% of the votes, but it continues until all but two parties are eliminated. Only these two top parties receive seats in the chamber of confidence in proportion to their final vote shares in the AV contest. Based on voters’ revealed preference rankings, a mandate to form the cabinet is conferred to the winner of the AV contest. --------------- A second important issue is the way in which the chamber of confidence is elected. If our goal is to mimic presidentialism (i.e. to enable voters to directly legitimize a single political force as the government), single-seat districts are a liability, rather than an asset. A superior approach is to elect the chamber of confidence in a single at-large district. This solution is also fairer in that every vote counts equally for the election of the government, regardless of where it is located. --------------- A more systematic way to differentiate confidence authority could build on the logic of mixed-member proportional (MMP) electoral systems in countries such as Germany or New Zealand. That is, participation in the confidence committee could be limited to those assembly members elected under plurality rule in single-seat districts, whereas those elected from party lists would be denied this right. As discussed above, however, this would leave it to the voters to decide whether they interpret the constituency vote as one for the government—which it would essentially become—or one for a constituency representative. Moreover, since single-seat districts are used, it is far from guaranteed that the individual district contests would aggregate to a two-party system with a clear one-party majority in the confidence committee. And even if it did, the determination of the government party could hardly be considered fair. ---------------1 Some may argue that there would still be better options, such as Coombs rule or the Borda count (Grofman and Feld 2004). While I do not want to enter this debate, it is worth highlighting three attractive properties of AV: (a) a party with an absolute majority of first-preference votes will always be selected as the winner; (b) voters can submit incomplete preference rankings without being discriminated against (Emerson 2013); and (c) a manipulation of the outcome via strategic voting would require very sophisticated voters (Grofman and Feld 2004: 652).

​

My 3 questions are: 1 is there any way to solve the issues highlighted in the bolded text so as to use single-member districts that would also ensure a duopoly with an absolute one-party majority and would also be fair and 2 is in regards to the author's own solution of using an AV party ranking method. Is it feasible or are there issues with it that i'm not seeing? 3rd. Could one instead rate the ballots instead of ranking them?

Each district would continue to be single-member, but each district also has 5 points each that get allocated proportionally based on the share of the vote locally. The party with the highest share of the vote in a district is the one who gets to elect an MP in the single-member district. Each party has its vote weight of number of points / number of districts won. If a party that gets no riding seats has points, they can send their leader or best-performing candidate to represent them.

So I just watched this video and was wondering what would happen if:

1. You replace the closed list PR part of MMP with a (most) open list.
2. If you replace the FPTP part of MMP with an IRV (single winner).

Wouldn't that fix all the issues he pointed out in the video?

Also:

Wouldn't a combined full open list PR and STV (multiple winners) version of MMP be the ideal system where you get the best of both world?

Thoughts?

How would this play out and are there any flaws in this system that I am not seeing?

What do you think of the argument in this FairVote position paper?

Bit of a ridiculous premise but I was wondering if there was any feasible multi-member district PR method that could have been come up with during the time of the American constitutional convention and actually put to use. The founding fathers were pretty novel in their thinking when creating their new government and I was wondering if in a hypothetical that could have been extended down to the electoral area. If it helps; put it another way, if you could time travel to the constitutional convention what do you think you could suggest that could be simple enough to be understood and actually used. My thinking is SPAV could maybe be understood by Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson.

Considering we have blinding processes when hiring in companies or public agencies. Is it possible to have some kind of blind voting process where certain information such as a candidates race/sex/age etc. is hidden while still being representative of peoples beliefs?

Hi, first post here. I’ve thought about this for a while, while looking for better electoral systems to use here in the UK, and I’ve always wondered, why not combine a ranked ballot with an approval one. Allow voters to choose their preferred candidates in whatever order they want, including not ranking them at all, and even allowing them to ranked more than one candidate the same number. So A = 5, B = 3, C and D = 2 and E = 0. It seems like the best of both worlds, when it comes to voter choice.

I thought this is what a score ballot was, but it seems like it isn’t that.

Anyway, I would also like to learn what voting criteria this ballot would satisfy

So I understand that most people here are interested in saving democracy, which is great!

My request is more trivial in nature, but I would still appreciate your advice.

I was wondering if all the advice about choosing voting methods for political candidates is directly transferable to completely different contexts for voting applications.

For example, our sports team of 12-18 people is trying to figure out some policies and direction, and I want to use some kind of voting that isn't simple majority.

1. Are methods beyond simple majority necessary?
2. Between approval and ranked choice voting, which would be better?
3. Are there any other better methods?
4. UPDATE: someone advised that consensus would be best with such a small voter population, see advice here (and my reply to make sure I understood it) https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1c1je0j/for_internal_organization_policies_not_public/kz3q76r/

Example:

We are debating how to grow the size of our team from 10 members to possibly more in a manageable way. We are collecting ideas which may not be mutually exclusive in implementation and want to vote on them.

Also, we want to take a vote on how to choose new team members (e.g. "Can a single veto reject a new player?"), how far in advance to prepare for tournaments, what to prioritize in practices, etc.

I have been trying to think it through but for whatever reason it feels unintuitive and strange to try and convert info about strategic voting, spoiler votes, etc to this context

If you believe another PR system is more likely to defeat FPTP than these options, let me know in the comments

View Poll

Constraints:

• Disregarding concerns like complexity of implementation or explanation
• Picking one winner from an arbitrarily-sized list of items
• Bonus points for ending up with a ranking of all items

Maybe what I'm asking is -- what do you think a bunch of voting nerds should use to pick a movie to watch or a board game to play or something?

I’ve made my own system of voting, though it might already exist. It basically operates on a grading scale, A-E, or A, B, C, D, F. I’ve yet to really find any problems with it? I have no issues with BTR or Benham’s method, burying is very counterintuitive in those systems but it can still happen. IRV is definitely the best of the popular options but it’s flawed center squeeze not to mention early eliminations always could be Condorcet winners.

Basically the idea is the candidate with the least A grades goes against the candidate with the most F grades. Whichever is least favored by all, is eliminated first. The cycle repeats until a Condorcet winner is elected, not a majority winner. This is also immune to b the bullet issue as they default to “C.” If a candidate has no A votes or E votes then it goes to the next letter. This is simple enough to explain I feel. There’s still very minor center squeeze in Benham’s and this alleviates that. It may elect an unexpected winner, but I believe that’s actually for the best and a direct counter to the tyranny of the majority.

Does this exist? Is this dog? Is Benham’s my favorite of the existing better? Also is it pointless making this if I know nobody will use it except maybe myself.

In the US we have an awful system. This probably goes without saying considering what subreddit were on. A lot of discussion has gone into why fptp is bad and what systems would be better. But not much discussion (as far as I've seen) goes into how we change the system.

Any strategy will be an uphill battle; democratic and republican politicians are against proportional representation (save the odd 1 or 2)

However, there is a strategy we can employ to begin putting real pressure to make this change.

We have 2 tools at our disposal:

1. The article 5 convention (a5c). Article 5 gives a road map on how states can call for a constitutional amendment.

2. Ballot initiatives. So far 24 states grant residents the ability to make and vote on laws (in some cases amend their state constitutions)

The proposal:

In these 24 states (which I know isn't enough to get an article 5 convention, but it's a start) we organize ballot initiatives which force the state to call for A5C specifically to introduce some form of PR.

We campaign for the ballot initiatives within the state.

Once we have the 24 states on board we lobby in some way the remaining states.

Hopefully we succeed. At th very least we can make PR a larger policy position than it is now.

Admittedly this is a longshot. A lot of things need to go right for this to succeed. However, I think in the current state of politics in the US, it is a good strategy to pursue, and has a chance of success.

side note: This strategy can also be employed to set up proportional representation in state governments, but not at the expense of the federal level. If it were up to me we'd be able to use it for both.

I like thinking about voting systems and I have thought about one system that I'm serious about that uses approval voting and another one I thought just for fun (which is based on existing voting systems, I'm not original). I want to see which criterions the system I thought about passes and which criterions it fails. Do I have to think about fictional elections to test the criterions? What about AI?

One of the biggest concerns for adopting list PR systems in the United States is the fact that they are usually unable to accommodate independent candidates.

In list PR systems, each independent are usually treated as their own single-member list which has a few big problems:

1. If an independent candidate is unable to reach the quota on their own, then their supporters will have no representation at all
2. If there are multiple similar independent candidates, there's a strong incentive to form an ad-hoc list to get over the quota and benefit from list transfers
3. If the independent candidate is very popular, then they may receive far more than the quota, ultimately leading to wasted votes—also incentivizing the formation of ad-hoc lists

While ad-hoc lists might not be very harmful, I think there are concerns about them causing the proliferation of minor personality-centric "parties" that emerge for electoral reasons.

In order to accommodate truly independent candidates in an open-list system, voters would select a party/list preference (or none), and then choose to vote for either a candidate on the list, an independent candidate, or no candidate at all.

Then, in the election, if an independent candidate wins a quota, they are elected, and the excess ballots have their voting power reduced by a fraction. Afterwards, the fractional ballots are allocated to the party total, and then seats are apportioned to each party, which are then filled by vote totals on the lists.

No paywall.

I find this topic really interesting, in particular for state level legislatures. I'm of the opinion that bicameral legislatures are inefficient, and bogs down the legislation process due to how easily vetoes occur within the branch. Bicameral legislatures are particularly useless at State levels, because in our founding we wanted to give small states proper representation, to avoid secession, which was why the Senate was established to give equal representatives for all states. And that is absurdly useless for states to incorporate into their governments (because small districts aren't going to secede from the state anytime soon).

I am a solid advocate for Unicameral legislatures at state levels, I even made a presentation for how small parties could start a movement for this. However, now I am curious about the idea of a tricameral system.

Wherein: one house could be by population proportion, another house by equal number of districts, and third is seats given by party count at every election. The rule would be that two houses are required to move the law to the governor's desk, and the bills can be negotiated between houses anytime unless all three houses veto it. This would speed up legislation, while still giving wide representation overall.

Because an argument I once heard is "should we really reduce the number of representatives as population increases?" Which is what Nebraska essentially did. Maybe we shouldn't reduce the number, but things would get more inflated going the opposite direction. If we were to increase the number of representatives, we'd equally need a way for them to work together in a speedier process. Because I can imagine a legislative branch with 1000+ people but with a lot of of white noise keeping things from passing.

What are your thoughts, between a Unicameral or Tricameral legislature, with the goal to pass more laws quickly and efficiently?