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Center for Election Science is holding an "election watch party" on Discord, too! Starts 8PM ET

Watch Party Discord Link

Here's the email I received:

​

>The moment has arrived! Today is the day that Fargo makes history by becoming the first city in the US to use approval voting! I know you've waited for this day with us since the initiative passed in 2018, so I'd love to celebrate with you.
>
><strong>Join us tonight at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT for a virtual &quot;watch party&quot; to celebrate on our Discord server!</strong>
>
>Just join the Discord, and then click on the #fargo-watch-party voice channel. It will be a casual event, so feel free to drop in any time. We'll chat about the election results, efforts to bring approval voting to other areas, and whatever else you want to talk about!
>
>Let us know if you have any questions about how to use the Discord—it's easy, I promise. Hope to see you there tonight at 8pm ET! 
>
>Best,
>
>Aaron Hamlin
Executive Director

Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop

Collective Decisions and Voting

From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting by Judith Brett is seriously one of the best little books I have ever read. Goes into great detail on:

• the invention of the Australian ballot, also known as the secret ballot, including the provision of a standardised government-issued ballot paper and the provision of a private space to mark that ballot;

• the development of independent electoral administration including the role of William Boothby;

• the innovation of direct election of the Australian Senate, as set down in the Constitution in 1901;

• the Franchise Act of 1902, which enfranchised women while disenfranchising Indigenous Australians and other people of colour;

• the first attempts to introduce preferential and proportional voting systems in 1902 and the subsequent adoption of these voting systems in 1919 and 1948;

• early unsuccessful attempts to introduce compulsory voting, the successful introduction of compulsory enrolment followed by the introduction of compulsory voting in 1924;

• voting on Saturdays;

• the rise of the Country Party in sync with the introduction of preferential voting in 1919, and how the introduction of proportional representation in the Senate helped encourage more minor parties;

The definitive one, imo, is Behind the Ballot Box by Douglas Amy

Also very very good: Tyranny of the Majority by Lani Guinier

We could contact the people in charge: https://www.chess.com/about

Try to reach the developers or other interesting people (research & big data may be interested in this) about the possibilities.

Electowiki also explains VoteFair Ranking.

The book Ending The Hidden Unfairness In U.S. Elections explains VoteFair Ranking using examples (without any equations). The last chapter explains the many reasons why widespread economic prosperity will increase after better vote-counting methods are adopted.

GitHub has open-source code for calculating VoteFair Ranking results.

I’m the designer, coder, and author.

To clarify, IPE and RIPE are like bicycle-training-wheel versions of aspects of VoteFair Ranking. I created them recently for people who find the full version too complex.

You were missing a slash in your link, it should be: https://www.debian.org/vote/2020/vote_001

This election was very uncontroversial by the looks of it; the winner got at least 80% of the vote in all of their runoffs.

I already thought about this. It would show up as an intermediate color/marker with details on the caveats.

My inspiration was a mixture of I Side With and Can I Use.

It should be as unbiased as possible. I'd personally stick with academic papers, formal proofs (wherever they are) and verifiable simulations.

> One single sample can sway the median from -1 to +1, opposite extremes, regardless of how many samples there are. The mean barely moves.

You can see this by dragging a point in https://www.geogebra.org/m/dA4HuFCn

> The reason I think it is more intuitively fair, is that with median everyone has equal pull.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Try this example, and move one voter from the left group to the right group. The median moves a lot:

https://www.geogebra.org/m/dA4HuFCn

True, if you zoom out and move a voter far outside the groups, the median stops moving, but the centroid doesn't move much, either.

I think you will have a hard time with your revolution, for the same mechanism that makes FPTP a problem.

Think about FPTP without a two party system, everyone voting honestly. Then the result has nothing to do with most support, but the most homogeneous group will win. And this group is homogeneous because of simple answers/populism. All those people with an sophisticated opinion will vote for several single candidates.

You get the same problem when proposing an utopia, in this case in the form of a social revolution - all your possible supporters would form a homogeneous group. Everyone with a sophisticated might argue with one or two points about it, or how it is executed (just as I do now) and might not want to submit to that vision. Just as the group in power is the homogeneous one, the people you are trying to reach are the heterogeneous ones.
On the scale from dictatorship to democracy for social systems, there are only few systems on the dictatorship side, but an overabundance of systems on the democratic side. Therefor it will always be easier to find a homogeneous group to support a dictatorship than a particular type of democracy - even if most people are for democracy.

The solution to this problem is, not to propose one solution but a system, or tools on how to go forward into the same direction. So that everyone can pick what they agree with an work on it independently. For a network to have synergy effects, but have everyone pick how and how much they engage with it. Similar to "If you like voting reform you might also like cooperative housing".
I am currently working on a (German) website that lists such alternatives and gives people information on how to switch to them (similar to prism break.

Are there any Internet polling services for Score?

Edit: https://pollunit.com/en/tutorials/range_voting

It could be interesting to have people vote using Score, and then show them what RCV would've done with those same ballots converted into ranked ballots.

Another idea would be voting with ranked ballots with approval thresholds, so that you could compare the Approval and RCV winners.

Eh most of these seem pretty experimental and lots are just github code bases which I don't have the time nor expertise (I'm not a developer) to set a server up.

If you haven't seen it https://star.vote/ is a great website that can let you run any STAR poll easily.

I know https://www.loomio.org/ recently added in scored voting support.

>But this reasoning seems suspect, because it leads to an absurd conclusion. Taken to a logical extreme, only Random Ballot works because it is the only completely strategy-proof election method, even if its honest results are awful. If it's true that a method that gives you a bad result with strategy and a good one otherwise is worse than a method that just gives you a bad result outright, then this should follow.

Also, I think single-winner random winner would be terrible, because it has too high a potential to not represent the entire populace, but I actually am not 100% opposed to multi-winner sortition being adopted. Against Elections does a great job of making the case that it’s actually more representative.

Part of my ongoing transformation into a radical democracy extremist, here's a lecture from sortition advocates Reybrouck and Landemore.

• Reybrouck published his book "Against Elections" -- https://www.amazon.com/Against-Elections-David-Van-Reybrouck/dp/1847924220

• Landemore has also written about sortition "Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century" -- https://www.amazon.com/Open-Democracy-Reinventing-Popular-Century/dp/0691181993/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=helene+landemore&amp;qid=1603494995&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1

A description of the talk:

>The crisis facing democratic regimes today is cause for serious concern; it is also an opportunity for deep reflection on questions and assumptions concerning liberal representative democracy. Instead of assuming a defensive posture and taking up arms to defend the status quo, our conference asks: how can we revitalize our democracy?

> Questions to be asked at our conference include:

> • Can elements of lottery revitalize democracy today?

> • How can we make our representative democracies more participatory?

> • Should we be afraid of democratic populism?

> • How can we reinvigorate institutions of deliberative democracy?

> • What new institutions and practices can energize our politics?

It's also notable that 2 big Citizen Assemblies have concluded on climate change in the UK and in France.