Just the subject line on this is the most amusing thing I've read on this list
in a while.
Well said, sir!
On Dec 2, 2011, at 2:19 PM, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:
>
> David Wetzel said:
>
> s for center-squeezing, that's not really a problem in the US as a
> whole...
> Third parties are too small and
#x27;t that one thing that frustrates us so much with the
IRV advocates? They recognize that election method reform is important, but
then they go all-in on a mediocre reform.
Anyway, that's my random afternoon strategy opinion, I could be wrong.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
There's been some talk lately of publishing good reference implementations of
all the election methods we talk about in various forms of description. This
inspired me to write up my thoughts on programming election methods. It's in
the body of the message below, and also posted as a Google Doc
h
I counter-recommend git. I don't like it. If you like the new 'distributed
version control' system style, I recommend Mercurial. code.google.com also
supports mercurial.
My own election simulator is also up on google code, also with subversion.
It's kinda hidden inside my project for multi-lang
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388752673155403.html
Cites our own Warren Smith!
Clearly we've been going about advocacy all wrong. Politics is boring, we
should appeal to American's fascination with celebrities and sports.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
specifically, my results are here:
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/
Ka Ping Yee did them first. I think I did them second and bigger and more. I
haven't done any in a while, but my source is out there and there are other
implementations as well.
A
year later they repealed IRV. "Virtual Round Robin" elections, often known as
Condorcet's Method, don't have that flaw and are just as easy or easier to
implement than IRV. A few people have latched onto IRV and promoted it a lot,
perhaps somewhat staking their reputations on it n
On Mar 11, 2010, at 11:29 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
> As with any choice system based on cardinal utility, there end up being two
> problems that are not, I think, amenable to solution. One is the
> incomparability of individual utility measures from voter to voter (and here
> we're talking a
A couple years ago I moved from the California Democratic Party Machine to the
Massachusetts Democratic Party Machine.
I'm not sad when my party wins, I'm sad when they run boring stick-in-the-mud
establishmentarian candidates.
I'd love pressure from other parties to keep them honest, and that's
There was a question on the list a while ago, and skimming to catch up I didn't
see a resolution, about what the right way to measure multiwinner result
goodness is.
Here's a simple way to do it in simulator:
Each voter has a preference [0.0 ... 1.0] for each candidate. Measuring the
desirabili
On Jan 13, 2010, at 8:06 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
> 1. A rank choice ballot method:
>
> Any number of candidates may be running for office and any number
> allowed to be ranked on the ballot.
>
> Voter ranks one candidate vote =1
>
> Voter ranks two candidates, denominator is 1+2 = 3
> votes are wo
te much I'd be curious to see
just how these things play out amongst real Americans who aren election theory
wonks.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
http://bolson.org/dist/TX/txmask.png
http://bolson.org/dist/ME/memask.png
(All of the states should be available by similar URLs by state postal code.
Note the odd XX/xx capitalization.)
On Nov 28, 2009, at 6:57 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
> I generated some pdf maps of Texas.
>
> They are pretty bi
I agree with Juho. Define what a good redistricting result is, preferably in
terms that produce a single valued numeric score, and then produce maps by
whatever means you like and let the best map win.
I haven't seen a procedure defined that I was sure would always produce good
districts. While
t.
6. Strategy resistance. For any voter or bloc of voters, honest voting
maximizes expected utility.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Catching up from a couple weeks ago, I just wanted to add my short-
short version of explaining Proportional Representation that usually
gets a good response from people:
"A 20% group should get 20% of the seats."
It's pretty easy for people to be agreeable to that. I think in
general it mi
On Aug 13, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Brian Olson wrote:
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/20090810/
I think a few of these plots show Single Transferrable Vote
behaving badly in the same ways IRV does, with discontinuities and
irregular solution spaces.
I also
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/20090810/
I think a few of these plots show Single Transferrable Vote behaving
badly in the same ways IRV does, with discontinuities and irregular
solution spaces.
I also ran Condorcet and IRNR using combinatoric expansion.
Combinatoric variants of si
Oh yes, I'm very much in favor of Proportional Representation methods.
But for the foreseeable future we will have problems with drawing
districts and drawing better districts, and it's a kinda interesting
problem to tinker with too.
And I have this notion that it would be good to have a bica
As this isn't something I really want it's going to be hard to get
motivated to work it out.
That said I think the way to go about it is to make unbiased districts
by my current district, then pick one district with the highest
proportion of the desired minority to elevate and adjust all the
/dist/
XX where XX is any US state abbreviation.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Interesting UI. I'd thought about doing something like that but got
discouraged when I tried to make it work on Internet Exploder. Had it
for Firefox and Safari briefly though.
My apps are also still out there, doing simultaneous Condorcet
counting, histograms and other methods.
http://bet
I'm late to the party, but I downloaded their vote data and ran it
through my software and wrote up a page on it here:
http://bolson.org/~bolson/2009/20090303_burlington_vt_mayor.html
I think the most important point is the fundamental failure of IRV as
itself, not any quibbling over a bad ba
On Mar 22, 2009, at 4:24 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Again, the election method better get decided on before the
election, so that the voters can be told the rules and thus be able
to express their thoughts to whatever extent they choose within
what those rules support:
Condorcet:
On Feb 12, 2009, at 4:41 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
(Found something that might be it: http://saweis.net/svd/ )
Ah, that's the smart math way to do it with SVD.
Anyway, the basic point is that you can place each member of a
legislature on a 2-d plane based solely on their voting records and
then
I dumped the data through my implementations and got pretty similar
results which can be seen here:
http://bolson.org/voting/burlington_vt/
My implementations proceed with different rules which generally allow
any ranking or ratings to be cast and counted, so will have different
totals than
ng candidates as having majority
approval when they do not.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
d voter error would affect each differently. Right now
I'd guess there's no solution for systemic candidate error but
different methods are more or less vulnerable to voter error.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/20081203/
Tight population grouping at the left moving to widely spread on the
right.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
(Sent from my iPhone)
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
I did some small multiples runs. They kinda look good
http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/20081202/
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
(Sent from my iPhone)
On Dec 2, 2008, at 9:28 AM, "Raph Frank" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ultimately, there are more degrees of freedom than
Disorganized thoughts:
Standard deviation could be considered to be interchangeable with the
spacing between the choices.
Wider spacing is equivalent to tighter standard deviation.
I keep imagining a way to explain this as starting with a blank black
space and colored dots representing the
On Nov 26, 2008, at 5:53 AM, Greg wrote:
Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that
it's
unlikely to be bad.
Huh? One reason I think it's good in part because it's very likely to
elect elect the Condorcet candidate, if that's what you mean by
"unlikely to be bad." Som
Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that
it's unlikely to be bad.
Why bother with something that's unlikely to be bad when we can just
as easily get something without that badness?
Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See
how over thousand
There's been a lot of discussion lately started by people who advocate
IRV. I'm mystified. Really? You really think IRV is a good system?
I've spent so long considering it to be pretty much junk that I really
am confused by that position. Here's my summary of why I think IRV is
junk.
(fro
Minnesota Public Radio has this excellent piece on their website
showing 15 (so far, they may be adding more) controversial ballots.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2008/11/19_challenged_ballots/
All are based on some form of optical scan paper ballot in which the
voter is supposed
I actually already have a mode in my program to run multiple elections
at each point and average the color of the winners over those rounds.
It doesn't hurt anything to have more than three candidates as long as
each one gets a color reasonably distinctive from the others. As long
as each c
Hmm, only kick out the losingest loser. I kinda think there would
still be discontinuities, but it might be better. Probably worth
trying. Now I just need to code that up and run the diagram code.
Dunno when I'll actually get around to that.
Has anyone checked what happens to regular IRV un
biggest change, and likely biggest bang-per-buck we can get out of
changes to work on.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
On Oct 16, 2008, at 10:11 PM, Greg Nisbet wrote:
Which system do you think would work best that is actually achievable?
That's like asking the oft asked question, 'which candidate is
electable?' and I HATE that question.
It's like suggesting that we prematurely compromise and compress our
On Oct 15, 2008, at 1:59 PM, Peter Barath wrote:
I'm not sure I would vote honestly in such circumstance.
Let my "honest" rangings be:
100 percent for my favourite but almost chanceless Robin Hood
20 percent for the frontrunner Cinderella
0 percent for the other frontrunner Ugly Duckling
I th
On Oct 14, 2008, at 12:11 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Brian Olson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Once upon a time, I designed an election method to fix the strategy
problem
with Range Voting.
The method I call "Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings" (I
Hey, that's neat. I must have missed it the first time around. The N
parallel images of black/winning area actually show pretty well how
various candidates win in multi-winner elections. Maybe I'll extend my
software to do similarly.
On Oct 14, 2008, at 12:17 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
Btw, if
out the nasty jumps in the decision process. Needs to be
experimentally (in simulator) checked, though.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
fense
against electoral malfeasance is probably through the political and
legal processes, and through the vigilance of the citizenry. We'll
never make a system so mathematically perfect that we don't still need
those other things.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
E
Hi Mike(s),
I hadn't seen zelea.com before. It looks interesting but I'm not sure
how to use it to actually run a vote on something.
I run
http://betterpolls.com/
which is generally designed to take votes from random people on the
internet, but can also do registered-voters-only.
I think it
On Sep 4, 2008, at 7:21 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On Sep 4, 2008, at 3:34 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
Those who would devise new schemes of electoral districts, especially
to go with new voting systems, ignore the reality of these various
"geographically defined communities" at their peril.
On Sep 3, 2008, at 5:32 AM, Raph Frank wrote:
On 9/3/08, Brian Olson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Anyway, what my pseudo-voronoi solver does is this:
Initialization:
• Assign district centers to random points (block
coordinates).
• Assign census blocks to nearest di
time, place, or audience for
discussing NP Hard problems, I will wave my hands and say, "Hey, look
over there! Good results, on my one puny computer! With more it'd only
get better!"
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
end, the human couldn't deviate too far from the ideal
mapping.
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
better sets. Maybe different parties or candidates try to find
alternatives where they would do better. If nothing is found then
the first
found set is declared elected.
Brian Olson suggests this approach for his anti-gerrymandering
proposals.
http://bolson.org/dist/USIRA.html
an
tation", that's just
good Democracy!
"previously underrepresented groups" is inconveniently long, but is
the best mix of connotation and denotation that I can think of right
now.
Just some things to think about so that once we've figured out what
the best possible
I'd like to see some things that would make the process more
understandable.
First, expand "FAWRB" somewhere on the site and explain it.
Part of the explanation could be showing all of the stages of the form
at once instead of making it a surprise as each stage shows up.
Alternately, or ad
lies
On the other hand, maybe I've spent too much time in my own little
world and this doesn't make sense to anyone else. Feedback, anyone?
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
I've talked to the guy who built it. He lives not too far from where I
do in the Boston area. I'm jealous of his shiny UI. It makes my http://betterpolls.com/
and http://poll.appspot.com/ look clunky and primitive (which is
accurate, since I didn't do anything beyond the 8 year old HTML 4.01
;Voting for only one choice is bad. If that one doesn't win, you don't
get any say over which of the others might get elected. Vote on as
many choices as you feel informed enough to vote on."
Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
I made a new polling site:
http://poll.appspot.com/
It allows rankings, ratings or approval ballots.
It requires everyone to have a Google Id. This should cut down on
ballot box stuffing, but may also be inconvenient for some users.
LGPL implementations of election methods in C, C++, Java an
I made a new polling site:
http://poll.appspot.com/
It allows rankings, ratings or approval ballots.
It requires everyone to have a Google Id. This should cut down on
ballot box stuffing, but may also be inconvenient for some users.
LGPL implementations of election methods in C, C++, Java an
On Dec 17, 2007, at 9:33 AM, Kevin Venzke wrote:
> --- Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit :
>> My own opinion is that state parties should directly elect delegates,
>> not Presidential candidates. Then the delegates make the choice, at
>> the convention. They can actually *delibe
In case anyone's interested in what the general public are hearing
about voting strategy.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/07/
ballot_query_to_bullet_or_not_to_bullet
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
On Aug 22, 2007, at 2:55 AM, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
> A common situation: 2 factions & 1 good compromise.
>
> The goal: Make sure the compromise wins.
>
> The problem: One of the 2 factions has a majority.
>
> A concrete example: true ratings are
>55 voters: A 100, C 80, B 0
>45 voters: B 10
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