I live in a Presidential non-swing state but am not enamored with either the Democratic or Republican nominees. I plan on voting this year, as I always do.

Mathematically speaking, my vote is a wasted vote, as my state’s Electoral votes will go to Trump, regardless of how I vote.

Am I helping either of the major parties MORE by voting for a third party or by simply not voting for President?

I wish a pox on both their houses and prefer to help neither.

Help me decide, mathematically — ethics be damned.

Oftentimes, disagreements on political policy are redundant, because political actions have negligible expected value on self-interested grounds.

But people still do politics in the same way as if doing otherwise would be unbearable.

Immigration is a good example.

This makes little sense - generally, we perform actions that benefit the impartial good more when we won't bear costs ourselves.

So you think immigrants will take your job, hurt your wages and overwhelm your city?

Why not vote in favor of immigration anyways?

I wrote about this in more detail here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/dylanrichardson/p/why-not-vote-on-principle?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=rj6jj

The link for the guide is here: docs.google.com/document/d/1J-LJ7RSHnQ_8R-EmpOs3CVWMf511-bjB-OswDRqUT8g/edit

We have a vote coming up; 6 people running for 4 open seats. I like 2 candidates; A & B. But dislike 4 candidates; C, D, E & F. Of the disliked candidates, C & D are more tolerable than E & F.

At least 2 of the disliked candidates will win, but I'd like to keep that # at 2, plus E & F really need to lose. Which is the better strategy:

1. Only vote for A & B to give them a better chance of winning, or

2. Vote for A, B, C & D with the hopes of my favorites winning and keeping E & F off the board.

Hello, we are a group of psychology researchers from the University of Kent, UK. It would be a huge help if anyone from any background who is interested would fill out our quick survey (18+ years old only) about your views of politics, society, and more.

Fill out the survey here: https://universityofkent.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8ICkX7mBre5IGpM

We are posting here because we hope to collect responses from a wide range of political perspectives and backgrounds. Please let us know if you would like a summary of your responses in comparison to others once the data collection is complete.

The survey takes 15-30 minutes to complete, and we are happy to respond to any queries or questions. Please private message us to avoid giving away the point of the study to others.

Thanks for your time.

Edit: The survey is now closed! Thank you very much for your time, we will be sure to post the results up here when they're ready.

I am using a ranked choice or single transferable vote to have students decide which movies to watch. There are 10 different movies to chose from and there will be 3 winners that get watched.

When it comes to ranking, should students be able to vote 1st choice all the way to 10th choice. Should it be cut off at 3rd choice because there can only be 3 winners. A current test run of the program let them pick 1st to 5th choice. Does it actually matter?

This may be the dumbest question. I'm in the USA and I get that 2024 is apparently gonna be a big election. But I just turned 18 and I can finally vote and I wanna make sure I'm doing it right, not just in federal elections but all the way down, judges and things. How do you know you're making the right decision?

Every person should have election day off not just bankers and postal workers etc… it should be a mandatory federal holiday

What is the minimum number of delegates the Republican and Democratic parties in your state(California) will be able to send to their next national nominating conventions?

Which party will be able to send bonus delegates?

He has researched it online to no avail as have I. Or perhaps any leads on how I might go about figuring this out? Thank you so much!

I'm far from an export on ranked ballot voting theory, but I find it interesting and have looked at a number of RCV and Condorcet advocacy sites as well as basic math sites on the topic. I don't recall ever seeing discussion of a 2 stage election which I’m trying to research now. Anyone know of any references? (haven't found one yet, but if I do, I'll comment below)

More Details:

In a 2 stage ranked ballot election, the first stage (primary) may have a large (but still limited) number of candidates and you are allowed to rank as many as you want (thoughtful ballot design required), and the second stage (general) should be limited to the "best" (with best up for definition) N candidates to be in the general election. Presumably more people will vote in the general than the primary and most primary voters will also vote in the general (with some sore losers exiting). I'd choose N between 5 and 10 somewhere, and I'd lean towards a Condorcet scheme that uses precinct by percent matrix accumulation, but if two stage has been discussed at all, I imagine it's been looked at with multiple counting schemes.

One could argue that “best” = the same thing when you fill an N seat council. That may not pick up that many minority candidates, but if N is in the higher side (say 10 rather than 5), maybe that is still the best way to handle it as it is familiar to everyone and would likely pick up someone very popular to say 5% of the people.

Hi everyone! I'm new to this subreddit.

I'm in the US but like to follow parliamentary elections in other countries, and I often notice how the outcome of an election in countries with proportional representation (party list or MMR) depends (somewhat arbitrarily) on which parties barely make it above the PR threshold and which parties fall just below it.

I've wondered why, in order to avoid wasted votes, no jurisdiction that I'm aware of lets voters rank party lists in order of preference, and then, if that voter's first-ranked party choice does not meet the PR threshold, allows their vote to contribute to the vote share and seat count of whatever that voter's highest-ranked party is that does meet the PR threshold.

Here's an example. Suppose that in an election in some imaginary country, a left-leaning voter ranks the parties in order of preference, putting a very small socialist party first, a slightly larger green party second, and a large social democratic party third. If, as is likely, the small socialist party fails to meet the PR threshold based on people's first preferences, but the green party does, that voter's vote will contribute to the vote share (after reallocation of preferences) and seat count in the parliament of the green party. If the green party doesn't meet the PR threshold with people's first preferences but the social democratic party does, then that voter's vote will contribute to the vote share and seat count of the social democratic party.

This voting system would not help any party that fell short of the PR threshold to make it into parliament. Rather, it would help prevent the votes for parties that fall short of the PR threshold from being wasted by allowing those votes to go to the second, third, fourth, etc., preferences of their voters.

Note that this system might sound like but is different from STV like the system used for the lower house of the Republic of Ireland and for the Australian Senate. STV has multi-member districts with candidates winning seats based off voters' listed preferences, but because voters vote for candidates rather than for party lists, you often wind up with a large number of independents being elected, which can make coalition-formation even more difficult than it is with multiple small parties. Although some people like this system because it has the potential to encourage deliberation and compromise, I was looking for a voting system that tries to award votes proportionally to parties rather than individual candidates. (There are ways to allow voters to express their preferences for individual candidates in party-list PR systems, such as with open-list PR.)

Does this type of voting system exist and do I just not know about it? Does it have a name? Has anyone ever used it?

Hello,

At my library in Florida apparently there will be early voting for a "Preferential Primary Election" in March, then a "General Primary" in August. I found an explanation of what PPP is on the myflorida.com website, but can't find an explanation of GP, nor can I find anywhere on the internet in general that explains the GP and the difference between the two. Can you help me understand?

Thank you

General idea is to use a very simple ballot like in first past the post where you vote for a single candidate but to have multiple members per district so that candidates don't end up representing only 50% of the population.

Each district has a set number of vote shares and these voteshares are distributed among the elected candidates as per the election results

Example. Let's just say our hypothetical country is divided into districts of 100 people each, and each district has 10 voteshares in the congress/parliament.

The results in one district for candidates A, B, C, D, E and F are as follows

A - 49 votes, B - 20 votes, C - 15 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Each candidate has to show enough votes to control a vote share. In this case, (100/10)+1=11 votes

So,

Round 1 - A gets voteshare 1. Now we have

A - 38 votes, B - 20 votes, C - 15 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 2 - A gets voteshare 2. Now we have

A - 27 votes, B - 20 votes, C - 15 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 3 - A gets voteshare 3. Now we have

A - 16 votes, B - 20 votes, C - 15 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 4 - B gets voteshare 4. Now we have

A - 16 votes, B - 9 votes, C - 15 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 5 - A gets voteshare 5. Now we have

A - 5 votes, B - 9 votes, C - 15 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 6 - C gets voteshare 6. Now we have

A - 5 votes, B - 9 votes, C - 4 votes, D - 10 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 7 - D gets voteshare 7. Now we have

A - 5 votes, B - 9 votes, C - 4 votes, D - 0 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 8 - B gets voteshare 8. Now we have

A - 5 votes, B - 0 votes, C - 4 votes, D - 0 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 9 - A gets voteshare 9. Now we have

A - 0 votes, B - 0 votes, C - 4 votes, D - 0 votes, E - 4 votes, F - 2 votes

Round 10 - E gets voteshare 10. (I've decided to give ties to the candidate with fewer voteshares but this can be resolved in any number of ways) Now we have

A - 0 votes, B - 0 votes, C - 4 votes, D - 0 votes, E - 0 votes, F - 2 votes

So, we have ended up with A having 5 vote shares, B having 2, C, D and E having 1 voteshare each which seems like a fair representation of the electorate.

This appears to preserve locality (i.e. candidate is local), representation (i.e. most voters have a representative they can call that they actually voted for), while also letting parties that have a broad national support but few local political strongholds (think lib dems in the uk), and those that have a strong regional base (think SNP) have representation proportional to voters.

Also, no need to explain what approval voting or ranked choice or STV or MMP or party lists to voters, nor is there any need for complex mathematics nor computer calculations required to tabulate the results. Everything can easily done by hand when verification is required with simple arithmetic. And finally, no need for centralized counting that some methods require (as in counts from different precincts can just be tallied up and it'll be fine). Oh, and you get to have both independent candidates and party candidates

I haven't really put much thought into this. I just had a showerthought earlier. So, what am I missing? Does this method already have a name? What are the weaknesses? Am I missing something blindingly obvious?

Normally, discussions of voting theory discussions revolve around elections of positions of authority, or public referenda. I hope you don't mind the change of pace to something less consequential, but with much less entrenched interest in the status quo; the Eurovision Song Contest. I want to write a post on r/Eurovision to propose a new set of voting rules But I decided to present my ideas to people who know more about voting theory first.

The ideal voting system for ESC may be different from what's ideal for public elections. In public elections, a candidate that's passionately liked by 40% of voters should not be chosen over one that's preferred by the majority. But for a music competition, it may be better to select someone who is passionately liked by 40% of the audience over one preferred by the majority. One can be a good musician even if their work doesn't appeal to many people. Being too majoritarian may make entries too formulaic. Another consideration is that we want voting to be an enjoyable experience.

In the current system, half of the vote comes from public televoting, with the other half from juries of 5 music professionals from each country. If I understand correctly, voters from the general audience vote for entries using approval voting over the phone or internet. This is converted into a positional voting system, in which each country gives 12 points to it's most-voted entry, 10 points to it's second most-voted, and 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, & 1 to the rest of it's top ten. For the jury vote, each juror ranks their favourite entries. They use some kind of ranked voting system to determine the jury favourites in each country, possibly the one described above. Then each country gives points to others using the same positional system described above, but this time based on votes from their jury. Nobody is allowed to vote for their own country.

Instead of a 2-step process where people vote, and then countries vote based on how their people vote, I think a new system should be more direct, with less distortion based on where voters are located. Instead of each country being equally represented, I think it should be closer to proportionate, at least for the public vote. Perhaps the weight for each country could be ∛([voters]×[population]).

Here are the methods I have though of that can be used to select the winner in the grand final:

Approval Voting: Each voter gives one vote to each entry they would be happy to see as the winner, and 0 to everyone else. The winner would be the one with the highest approval percentage among voters eligible to vote for them. It can't be the sum, as people cannot vote for their own country. However, someone may still favour their own country by not voting for anyone likely to win, so there would need to be a mechanism to prevent this.

Schulze Method: This is a very majoritarian method. But the advantage is that it allows voters to freely rank entries from other countries, without significantly affecting their own country's chance of winning. We may limit voters to a limited number of tiers to reduce the impact of minor preferences. For each pair of entries, each country's contribution to the vote can be based on the following formula: ∛((a-b)×[population]).

Chiastic Score Method: This is a rather obscure cardinal method related to majority judgement. Each voter gives each entry a rating from 0 to 10. For an entry to get a final score of 1/10, at least 10% of voters must give at least 1/10. For a final score of 2/10, at least 20% must give 2/10. The final score for each candidate is the highest in which x percent of voters gave that candidate at least x percent of the maximum allowed rating. This method isn't majoritarian, but gives a measure of support more suited to a diverse music contest. This method is more strategy resistant than score voting.

But voters may not like that this method doesn't fully use their ratings over the full range. Giving an 8/10 is effectively the same as 10/10, as it's highly unlikely for any entry to get a chiastic score of more than 8/10. The following two hybrids are supposed to address this problem, and take more information from voters into account.

Chiastic pairwise hybrid: First it determines the chiastic score for each entry using the same 0 to 10 rating scale from voters. It then infers pairwise ranking from the scores given. For someone other than the chiastic score winner to win, they must beat them in a pairwise matchup by a larger margin than their difference in chiastic score. For example, if Entry A has a chiastic score of 7.6/10, & Entry B has 6.8/10, then Entry B must beat Entry A in a pairwise matchup by a margin of more than 8% in order to beat them.

Chiastic score hybrid: First it determines the chiastic score for each entry using the same 0 to 10 rating scale. Then, for each voter that gave a rating to a particular entry, it takes either the rating given, or the chiastic score, whichever is higher, and then averages all of them together. Therefore, if an entry gets a chiastic score of 5/10, it makes no difference if you gave them a 1/10 or 4/10, but giving them a 10/10 instead of 5/10 would make a difference. This method should be good at estimating the enthusiasm for each entry.

So there are my ideas. For the two hybrid methods I created, especially the latter, I would be interested in hearing if it has any characteristics which I may have missed.

For the cardinal methods, I would also like to hear ideas for mechanisms to prevent harsh ratings in order to favour one's own country. We would need to have a mechanism to determine if one's ratings are too harsh, and by what degree. We would then either reduce the voting weight of voters with excessively harsh ratings, punish entries of countries who gave overly harsh ratings, or a combination of both.

I have just created this collaborative map of open-source projects & resources around preferential voting. Including software, votes services, formats, and other tools / datas.

https://github.com/CondorcetVote/Condorcet-Voting-Open-Source-Ecosystem-Map

This is still incomplete, pull requests are welcome to improve it. Projects must be free (open-source), serious, not too specific to one case (custom test, specific research), and maintained.

If you don't know how to use Github, you can also contribute here.