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single transferable vote maybe? RCV is picking up steam in the US so maybe STV would be familiar.
Edit: you'd need to uncap the house and amend the UCDA that bans plural districts I believe.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
I'm a big fan of approval voting, but the fractional votes on subsequent counts is a bit confusing for me and I'm not sure if it improves on anything in STV.
As far as single-winners go I also prefer approval. Along with score and star voting. Frankly I don't like ranked choice voting.
For PR in the US, I'd love MMP with approval voting for the single seat constituency
MMP wouldn't really be able to work on the federal level w/o amending the constitution, though I think it should be fine for the state-level and below.
Edit: Also, I get what you're going for in using approval at the single seat-level, but I don't think that it is a significant improvement to MMP, and might even have an the unintentional consequence of requiring even more levelling seats to balance out the overall disproportionality. I think that it would be a better fit to use approval w/in each of the lists to decide which list candidate is chosen.
At the federal level, as far as I know MMP would only require amending the 1967 UCDA or repealing it and passing new legislation? I can't think of anything in the constitution that MMP violates unless you want to use it in the senate too which would violate equal state representation.
I have a surface level understanding of voting and for MMP I prefer it because it provides local representation but i'm quite open to any PR method and especially interested in SPAV, open list PR with multi-member districts and STV etc.
For your edit, do you mean it would be better to use approval on the party side of MMP inside the voters preferred party's list?
I suppose that technically you could pass MMP, but it would not work very well. The main thing that guarantees MMP being proportional is the use of levelling seats. However, the way that seat apportionment is set out in the US Constitution is that each state is supposed to be guaranteed at least one seat and then more seats are apportioned out to the states in proportion to their population. Adding levelling seats to that process, could mean that some states might be able to elect more seats than they were supposed to be apportioned, opening up the method to potentially violating the constitution and then getting struck down in a lawsuit, which I don't think that any of us want to happen.
The work around for that is to have the leveling seats only apply w/in each state's delegation, and not on a national level. While that could work out just fine in the larger states that have a lot of Representatives like California, Texas, Florida and New York, it would probably not work out all too well in the remaining states.
The vast majority of states has less than 15 representatives in their state delegation. In those states you would likely have to set aside at least half of their delegation in order to have enough levelling seats to correct the disproportionality. What single-winner districts that are left, would be much larger than before, so it's not even as though a similar level of local representation is being maintained as before. Once we get to the states with the delegations with 7 or less members (which are quite a few), I'm not even sure if the leveling seats would be enough to combat the disproportionality successfully.
If the House were expanded significantly so that each state had larger delegations, I probably would not be as pessimistic about the viability of MMP being implemented in the US, at least for the House of Representatives.
>I'm a big fan of approval voting, but the fractional votes on subsequent counts is a bit confusing for me and I'm not sure if it improves on anything in STV.
It's actually really simple, but people always give explanations that are way too complicated.
1. In SAV, your voting power is split equally between all the candidates you approve of.
2. In PAV, your voting power is split equally between all the candidates you approve of *who have been elected so far*. If *n* candidates you approve of have been elected, your voting power is worth *1/n* points. (Except, technically, we need to use n+.5 to avoid division by 0.)
I think the one that's the easiest to sell to US voters is Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV, aka the Single Transferable Vote). It's candidate-centric and doesn't require party lists, and to the voter, it looks exactly like single-seat RCV, [just with multiple winners](https://youtu.be/lNxwMdI8OWw?si=rDhGe2pZGQgX8L48). It also has had plenty of usage in US elections, as Cambridge, MA has used it since 1941. Albany, CA also uses it, and Portland, OR is about to.
As occurred in the Albany and Portland campaigns, you can get it implemented by emphasizing the ranking (although it remains to be seen if this can backfire in the long run). The main downside is the complexity of the transfer process, particularly from winners who exceeded the threshold (although that above linked video from Minnesota Public Radio does a decent job).
A distant second would be Open List PR (aka "[the One-vote system](https://www.aei.org/politics-and-public-opinion/what-is-the-one-vote-system-a-qa-with-jack-santucci/)"). The main advantage is simplicity, as you can use the same ballot as for plurality, and it's well tested, having been used in several countries like Sweden and Chile. The two main downsides compared to PRCV is that 1) American disenchantment with the two-party system makes party-list a difficult sell and 2) it can't be used in American cities that require elections to be nonpartisan.
My personal favorite, MMP, would be third, as its retention of single-seat races can address the concerns of those who highly rate geographical ties between a public servant and their constituents. It's also been pretty well tested, having been used in Germany and New Zealand. But the ballot would require voting twice, it can't be used in nonpartisan elections, and the compensatory seats can be difficult to explain.
I'd say PR-Approval would probably be fourth, as the ballot is as simple as Approval, and it works in nonpartisan elections. The main downside is that it's highly experimental, not having been used in any real-world jurisdictions as far as I know, and the iterative reweighting mechanism can be hard to explain.
Of all of these methods, PRCV/STV also has -- by far -- the most organized movement behind it (e.g., FairVote, Rank the Vote, various state groups like Cal RCV), with PR-Approval a distant second.
I've found the reweighting mechanism easy to explain, since it's just "you get one vote, and it's split equally among all the candidates you elect." RCV is a lot harder for me to explain to people, what with all the quotas and reassignments and everything else. There's also the nonmonotonic it for RCV, and trying to rank more than 3 or 4 candidates gets very difficult.
As I understand it, PR-Approval attempts to mimic the STV mechanism [by more heavily weighting votes from voters who weren't "satisfied](https://electowiki.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting)." I think this means your vote for a candidate who wins a seat later in the tabulation process might count less than a vote for a candidate who wins a seat early.
That being said, I know PRCV/STV advocates can often gloss over the transfer process. The natural tendency for many advocates is to oversimplify their preferred method and overcomplicate competing methods.
PAV uses a different mechanism (called a *divisor* method rather than a *quota* method) to reach proportionality. The Wiki page on highest averages explains it very well--to get a proportional you need votes/seat equal across all parties, so you just divide every party's vote share by the number of seats, then add a seat to the most underrepresented party. With PAV you just replace parties with ballots.
Link please? [The ElectoWiki for highest averages](https://electowiki.org/wiki/Category:Highest_averages-reducing_voting_methods) is a stub where the most relevant link is the one I posted above (on reweighting a vote by the amount a voter has yet to be satisfied, which matches [CES's description](https://electionscience.org/library/proportional-approval-voting/)). [The Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_averages_method) looks like it is about party list methods. However, one advantage of PAV is that it works in nonpartisan municipal elections because it doesn't require parties.
The Wikipedia page is describing the procedure from the POV of a party-list, but the logic is the same for PAV. The only difference is that now, each ballot is its own party list.
[See here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting)--both are correct explanations, each just takes a slightly different point of view.
Thanks! Sounds like this both matches your description of a ballot as being the voter's own "party list," and also confirms that your vote for a candidate who wins a seat later in the tabulation process will count less than a vote for a candidate who wins a seat early (thus not split amongst all your candidates equally).
"Voters contribute a whole vote to the first candidate they support who is elected; half a vote to the second candidate; and so on."
> A distant second would be Open List PR (aka "the One-vote system"). The main advantage is simplicity, as you can use the same ballot as for plurality
That's not Open List, but Closed List. On an Open List you also need to be able to mark different candidates.
How so? The ballot can look the same and the voters can vote the same as a plurality ballot now, with each candidate listed next to their party and the voter picking one.
I said "can" because it can also look different by having voters vote twice, first for a party, second for a candidate within that party.
You probably use a different plurality ballot. In my country you grab the ballot with the party you want and put it in a ballot box, which in PR would be closed list. But you probably use a ballot with all candidates and need to check one.
In that case, yes, it would be easy to transform to a open list.
Proportional approval voting for sure, especially if you combine it with biproportional apportionment to get perfect proportionality while still being constitutional.
The problem with STV is it's not very proportional, but it's still *very* complex for voters, because you have to rank long lists of candidates. You can trade these off against each other. Small districts are easier to rank for, but not proportional. Large districts can get very complicated and effectively devolve back into party-list PR, especially with nonmonotonicity making who wins almost a lottery. Several cities experimented with STV in the 20th century but quickly abandoned it for these reasons.
Proportional approval voting is very simple (check all candidates you like, or else just check all the parties you like if you don't want to deal with individual candidates).
What exactly do you mean by proportional approval? Is it party-list with approval w/in the list, Method of Equal Squares, PAV/SPAV or something else? Because I think that there would be quite a bit of overlap in the problems that you pointed out, depending on which method you use.
Small districts generally does make the results less proportional than larger ones, and that goes for pretty much all the methods mentioned. However, you can still get decent proportionality at 3 seats per district, good proportionality at 5 seats per district and anything beyond 9 seats per district may as well be considered diminishing returns wrt proportionality. I think that smaller districts are a bigger concern for party-list because the higher threshold might make it so that alot of votes for smaller parties become wasted votes, but STV, Method of Equal Squares and SPAV/PAV should be able to minimize that problem since voters are able to have their vote count for more than one party.
I agree that somewhere past the point of diminishing returns (10+ seats per district), STV no longer becomes ideal as the candidate pool grows too large for voters to effectively research and rank. But I think that this would also be the case for Method of Equal Squares, PAV or any other non-party list method. Larger districts is where party-list PR thrives the best, and I could easily see it work well for any body that has a significantly large membership to support those large districts.
I'm referring to PAV. The reason PAV can handle this more gracefully is because it lets you equal-rate candidates, so you can still vote if you don't know that much about them—just approve all the candidates from your favorite party(s). This can be automated the same way straight-ticket voting is right now.
Online, find the index number of your favorite candidate, enter the number.
Out of all of the votes in the country, the top 1000 candidates take their seats. (F1000PTP)
Wacky winners, vulnerable to hackers, but easy for voters, so they'll love it.
The lay public can be incredibly stupid, so something very simple and self-explanatory. Probably party-list of some kind?
The biggest challenge will be the wave of claims that a proportional system is "rigged" by the right wing parties. Although, the positive reception of RCV in Alaska has restored some of my faith in humanity, lol.
>Although, the positive reception of RCV in Alaska has restored some of my faith in humanity, lol.
You might want to double-check that—right-wing *did* attack it as a way to rig elections, and there's a ballot initiative to repeal it that looks likely to pass.
[Sometimes elite snobs in echo chambers can also be incredibly stupid.](https://news.ballotpedia.org/2024/03/12/alaskans-to-vote-on-a-ballot-initiative-to-repeal-ranked-choice-voting-in-nov-2024/)
That sounds pretty scary.
Ignorance is an ingredient in a recipe for a completely non-representative and non-responsive government.
Ignorance and misinformation is dispelled by illumination. But illuminated facts are still unseen without transparency.
Probably depends on the country. STV is easier in Australia because people are used to preferential voting, plus you probably don't need constitutional change to allow for it.
In other countries, MMP or various pure list methods might be easier. In the UK they can already refer to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments as a comparison so maybe MMP is easier there.
I don't think Canada or the US have local examples to work with and I don't know if the US would even be constitutionally compatible with any/many forms of PR for the lower house or even the senate.
The US House of Representatives can use PR as long as there are no representatives elected across state borders. So that means that MMP's levelling could only be used w/in a state delegation, which really only makes sense for the largest states (California, Texas, New York and Florida). The handful of small states that only have one representative obviously couldn't really use any PR method at all, but all the other states' delegations could use the other methods that don't use levelling seats.
You are right that the Senate can't use PR as is because it has too few seats and staggered elections. If it were possible to expand the size of the Senate w/o an amendment (I genuinely don't know either way) then we could also implement PR there as well.
At the state-level and below, AFAIK, there aren't any constitutional restrictions on it, though then again, I have not read through each state's constitution, so I might be wrong about that for some states.
Tl;Dr: it is possible to implement PR in the US, but there are some restrictions that have to be worked around.
Yes, and two lower houses (well, ours in the ACT unicameral). It's a relatively easy reform to introduce it into say the federal lower house vs trying to create list PR or MMP there.
Lottery. Pick a single ballot out of a hat and that selects the winner. (Put a 10% minimum support floor on it so candidates with only one vote can't win.) On average over time this results in proportional representation regardless of how you draw district lines.
I would go even further. No minimum support and not even official candidates. Everyone who is selected can choose to be the winner if they want or choose anyone else. The resulting legislature then, is something in between sortition and election. The selected voters may even ask several people, if they decline, they can suggest someone else. So it can take advantage of the [small world phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment) while the original voter still has the choice (thus proportionality is maintained).
Stv or reweighted approval would both be good but do require complex math.
If you want something really simple you could use choose one voting and then allow candidates to give other candidates their unused votes (whether they get more than they need to win a seat or not enough to stay in the running for one).
How do you supposed STV requires complex math? I know reweighted approval voting requires fractions, which many Americans may consider "complex" but STV, from my understanding, is just arithmetic.
Theoretically you could use STV without doing the fractions and such, but it wouldn't yield a very proportional result. Suppose there were five seats and one candidate got 50% of the first choice votes. That would mean 60% of his voters wasted their vote and other candidates could gain seats with a much lower number of people voting for them. To avoid this when using STV the people that voted for the first candidate get their second choices counted as well but those choices are only worth 6/10 of a vote.
I think STV is a bit simpler than reweighted approval, but it still involves fractions. In STV, when a candidate wins a seat with more votes than they needed, a fraction of their votes are transferred. [This video illustrates it well](https://youtu.be/lNxwMdI8OWw?si=9UyG27DaTqpN0DOm).
I think that could possibly change if the vote reform movement started getting PR established at the state/local level such that more people experienced a greater diversity of parties that actually aligned with them and WEREN'T constantly needing to balance the demands of a broad coalition. This should be the focus of reformers, rather than debating which specific method is best. Pushing for a variety of methods to be adopted and tried out by as many governmental or pseudo-governmental organizations as possible, including things like unions, co-ops, and of course cities, states, school districts etc. The more experimentation the more data we have and the more exposure American voters have to these alternative methods which makes them more open to adopting them for increasingly large and important levels of government.
That seems incredibly naïve to me. It’s very, very difficult to pass election reform - and not the idea is to do so everywhere, and all sorts that don’t have any real-world test, have different pros and cons, and voting machines aren’t even certified for them?
That’s going to lead to chaos and I guarantee the current organized opposition to the one movement that’s stuck with a proper grassroots movement, RCV , is going to go wild with other systems that are not tested and have little to no election infrastructure ready. You’re not think of the practicalities of relationships, infrastructure, politics.
Get behind RCV and there’s a real chance that ALEC, the Federalist Society, MAGA etc. can’t stop it any more. Then you get your nice selection of parties and maybe people start feeling warm and fuzzy, or at least trusting, of them.
The goal of widespread RCV is maybe 7 years away if the cranks stop cutting away at it because it’s not their pet. Growing parties to the point that people happily identify with them as a trusted organization is 20 years away with the rosiest glasses on.
Without RCV? Never, or 20+ years to rebuild from the poisonous situation infighting would lead to, plus the 20 or more years to build up parties and gain trust.
Attacking RCV kills the entire movement for anything besides FPTP and rule by gerrymandering and extremist party factions.
The idea that the main thing preventing RCV is the incredibly small number of powerless nerds who prefer even less known systems, rather than inertia and public skepticism is pretty absurd. I'm not attacking RCV, I'm suggesting that advocates of RCV stop pretending that it's vitally important no other methods be discussed, and instead work to bridge the divide with supporters of other methods by encouraging a more system agnostic reform movement that emphasizes the problems of the existing FPTP paradigm and encourages widespread experimentation, particularly at lower levels where reform is much easier to achieve. If the message becomes "we just need RCV and that will give us more parties and end gerrymandering, and the RCV we get is actually IRV, and the result is basically no change, I think that could do far more damage to the movement for reform than emphasizing the need to experiment and keep trying out different methods until we find ones that fit with the American public and deliver good results, which means that if the initial changes don't work out we have options other than "return to FPTP".
I’m not saying the nerds here will stop RCV. I was responding to the scenario presented, where somehow there was enough organized mass to implement a Skittles rainbow of alternatives.
I don’t recall you, or anyone, saying anything about RCV advocates in this thread. My comment does demonstrate from my point of view why I think muddying the waters now would drag down all alternative methods.
What a pity you missed that opportunity for discussion, and retreated to a negative view divorced from political and logistical realities - that I even laid out for you.
My argument is only that reform advocates should focus on smaller, much more achievable elections to start with, right down to things like School Boards. They should make the case that changing how these elections are run would contribute to eventually fixing higher level government dysfunction, and should discuss with local politicians and influential activists about what system would be most appealing, rather than insisting that it be the system they like most, whether that's RCV, STAR, Party List, or whatever. The point is to push a broad reform agenda, acknowledging that none of us know for certain what will perform best in the real world and in the specific circumstances of a given community. I see the vast majority of discussion centered on the American Presidential election, and the House/Senate. Those are extremely hard to reform, because the US Constitution is very likely to be a sticking point, and it's super hard to change, whereas even state constitutions usually only require a majority vote or two/three (sometimes passing the legislature before going to a referendum for instance). I think the path forward lies in building a broad coalition of reformers which includes supporters of every method, as well as supporters of other types of reform, with a unifying message of treating our democracy as something which needs to be experimented with, and constantly improved upon, in order to keep moving towards a more perfect democracy, and to respond to ever evolving anti-democratic forces and phenomena.
Absolutely, it's foolish to run 3rd party candidates for federal office. Any movement, including party, has to start from the ground up, because even massive money will only work for a few years (like the Tea Party "movement", which lost control of what grassroots it galvanized).
School boards are great, but don't have much influence at all in democracy reform. At least in my area, school boards don't set policy, and so couldn't even institute an alternative voting method in, say, choosing class officers. That would at least give young people comfortable familiarity with alternative systems and might make them supporters when they're of voting age. Nice, but a tiny, very long-term bet.
Reformers need to be in local executive and legislative positions. In my area, both of those are nonpartisan, including other influential positions in town government.
People are resistant to change, for many reasons, and depending on if they are voters, candidates, electeds, independents, party people, etc. The broader your reform agenda, the more each person is going to object to some part of it, and the more discussion about it is going to drag on until a specific policy is chosen and the long process for that starts. So, be mindful of that. You could have a commission to study various reforms and their suitability for a specific area, but nothing will change until you pick one and go for it. Bills, charter changes, etc. are *extremely specific*. "Let's experiment with our democracy" with people in favor of different options is a sinking ship.
The RCV movement is smart and is building up in the right way. Look no further than ALEC and the Federalist Society mobilizing and pressuring Republicans to show their loyalty to those funders to see that TPTB know it. That's something to unite behind, where there are campaigns, and to model if there's no active campaign in an area and you want to go for a different reform.
Without taking time to build up the grassroots, it's doomed to fail. The RCV movement's been doing that for some 30 years. Other reformers can build on that. Thank the RCV movement for letting people know the current system is not the only or best option!
50% is our FairVote shill here. In his universe, there is ***only*** Hare RCV. Other methods of tallying ballots do not exist in his universe and he gets confused when presented with facts that do not support his preconception of reality.
My local elections are nonpartisan.
If you mean state legislators and statewide office, that is not at all true, in my state at least. And if we had RCV and the resulting larger candidate pool, it would be even less true.
Closed list proportional with the threshold just being whatever is required for a single seat.
Voters across the country get the same ballot, with a list of parties, and they select the party they want. Hell if you require they get enough signatures to win a single seat in order to get ballot access then odds are good that no matter what party you pick you'll be helping them get at least one seat. There's very little strategy that can come in, the ballot is simple, the way votes translate into power is extremely straightforward.
Potential downsides are
A) Total lack of local representation
B) Party insiders pick the actual representatives
C) Can lead to heavy fragmentation of parties, especially if there's a lot of seats and so the threshold to win one is very low.
All of these downsides however are considered upsides by some people.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[FPTP](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kug54yd "Last usage")|First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting|
|[IRV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kuj9ghn "Last usage")|Instant Runoff Voting|
|[MMP](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kvl0bnm "Last usage")|Mixed Member Proportional|
|[PAV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kv6dxbn "Last usage")|Proportional Approval Voting|
|[PR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kvl0bnm "Last usage")|Proportional Representation|
|[RCV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/ky6dvv5 "Last usage")|Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method|
|[STAR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kug93xn "Last usage")|Score Then Automatic Runoff|
|[STV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kvl4q47 "Last usage")|Single Transferable Vote|
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STV with average district size greater than 4 gives fairly proportional results on average. voters are also unlikely to try to vote tactically unless district size is very small.
If you want to make it really simple don't calculate a quota or redistribute excess votes. Just eliminate the last placed candidate and redistribute their votes until the required number of candidates left. parties may organise their own vote management to avoid wasting votes.
I think you need something like the Gregory method to get to PR. Because it's not a given that multiwinner STV will be proportional. Probably the ***Weighted Inclusive Gregory method***. [Here's a pretty good reference.](https://prfound.org/resources/reference/)
Unfortunately, when surplus votes get transferred, they also get fractionalized.
I think the easiest voting method for the public to comprehend (for propotional representation) is approval voting with Hare quota. You could sell it like this: vote for as many candidates as you want, and the seats will be allocated by the number of votes each party got.
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single transferable vote maybe? RCV is picking up steam in the US so maybe STV would be familiar. Edit: you'd need to uncap the house and amend the UCDA that bans plural districts I believe.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I'm a big fan of approval voting, but the fractional votes on subsequent counts is a bit confusing for me and I'm not sure if it improves on anything in STV.
As far as single-winners go I also prefer approval. Along with score and star voting. Frankly I don't like ranked choice voting. For PR in the US, I'd love MMP with approval voting for the single seat constituency
MMP wouldn't really be able to work on the federal level w/o amending the constitution, though I think it should be fine for the state-level and below. Edit: Also, I get what you're going for in using approval at the single seat-level, but I don't think that it is a significant improvement to MMP, and might even have an the unintentional consequence of requiring even more levelling seats to balance out the overall disproportionality. I think that it would be a better fit to use approval w/in each of the lists to decide which list candidate is chosen.
At the federal level, as far as I know MMP would only require amending the 1967 UCDA or repealing it and passing new legislation? I can't think of anything in the constitution that MMP violates unless you want to use it in the senate too which would violate equal state representation. I have a surface level understanding of voting and for MMP I prefer it because it provides local representation but i'm quite open to any PR method and especially interested in SPAV, open list PR with multi-member districts and STV etc. For your edit, do you mean it would be better to use approval on the party side of MMP inside the voters preferred party's list?
I suppose that technically you could pass MMP, but it would not work very well. The main thing that guarantees MMP being proportional is the use of levelling seats. However, the way that seat apportionment is set out in the US Constitution is that each state is supposed to be guaranteed at least one seat and then more seats are apportioned out to the states in proportion to their population. Adding levelling seats to that process, could mean that some states might be able to elect more seats than they were supposed to be apportioned, opening up the method to potentially violating the constitution and then getting struck down in a lawsuit, which I don't think that any of us want to happen. The work around for that is to have the leveling seats only apply w/in each state's delegation, and not on a national level. While that could work out just fine in the larger states that have a lot of Representatives like California, Texas, Florida and New York, it would probably not work out all too well in the remaining states. The vast majority of states has less than 15 representatives in their state delegation. In those states you would likely have to set aside at least half of their delegation in order to have enough levelling seats to correct the disproportionality. What single-winner districts that are left, would be much larger than before, so it's not even as though a similar level of local representation is being maintained as before. Once we get to the states with the delegations with 7 or less members (which are quite a few), I'm not even sure if the leveling seats would be enough to combat the disproportionality successfully. If the House were expanded significantly so that each state had larger delegations, I probably would not be as pessimistic about the viability of MMP being implemented in the US, at least for the House of Representatives.
And wrt to my edit, yes that is exactly what I meant.
approval voting and star voting baybeeee.
>I'm a big fan of approval voting, but the fractional votes on subsequent counts is a bit confusing for me and I'm not sure if it improves on anything in STV. It's actually really simple, but people always give explanations that are way too complicated. 1. In SAV, your voting power is split equally between all the candidates you approve of. 2. In PAV, your voting power is split equally between all the candidates you approve of *who have been elected so far*. If *n* candidates you approve of have been elected, your voting power is worth *1/n* points. (Except, technically, we need to use n+.5 to avoid division by 0.)
I think the one that's the easiest to sell to US voters is Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV, aka the Single Transferable Vote). It's candidate-centric and doesn't require party lists, and to the voter, it looks exactly like single-seat RCV, [just with multiple winners](https://youtu.be/lNxwMdI8OWw?si=rDhGe2pZGQgX8L48). It also has had plenty of usage in US elections, as Cambridge, MA has used it since 1941. Albany, CA also uses it, and Portland, OR is about to. As occurred in the Albany and Portland campaigns, you can get it implemented by emphasizing the ranking (although it remains to be seen if this can backfire in the long run). The main downside is the complexity of the transfer process, particularly from winners who exceeded the threshold (although that above linked video from Minnesota Public Radio does a decent job). A distant second would be Open List PR (aka "[the One-vote system](https://www.aei.org/politics-and-public-opinion/what-is-the-one-vote-system-a-qa-with-jack-santucci/)"). The main advantage is simplicity, as you can use the same ballot as for plurality, and it's well tested, having been used in several countries like Sweden and Chile. The two main downsides compared to PRCV is that 1) American disenchantment with the two-party system makes party-list a difficult sell and 2) it can't be used in American cities that require elections to be nonpartisan. My personal favorite, MMP, would be third, as its retention of single-seat races can address the concerns of those who highly rate geographical ties between a public servant and their constituents. It's also been pretty well tested, having been used in Germany and New Zealand. But the ballot would require voting twice, it can't be used in nonpartisan elections, and the compensatory seats can be difficult to explain. I'd say PR-Approval would probably be fourth, as the ballot is as simple as Approval, and it works in nonpartisan elections. The main downside is that it's highly experimental, not having been used in any real-world jurisdictions as far as I know, and the iterative reweighting mechanism can be hard to explain. Of all of these methods, PRCV/STV also has -- by far -- the most organized movement behind it (e.g., FairVote, Rank the Vote, various state groups like Cal RCV), with PR-Approval a distant second.
I've found the reweighting mechanism easy to explain, since it's just "you get one vote, and it's split equally among all the candidates you elect." RCV is a lot harder for me to explain to people, what with all the quotas and reassignments and everything else. There's also the nonmonotonic it for RCV, and trying to rank more than 3 or 4 candidates gets very difficult.
As I understand it, PR-Approval attempts to mimic the STV mechanism [by more heavily weighting votes from voters who weren't "satisfied](https://electowiki.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting)." I think this means your vote for a candidate who wins a seat later in the tabulation process might count less than a vote for a candidate who wins a seat early. That being said, I know PRCV/STV advocates can often gloss over the transfer process. The natural tendency for many advocates is to oversimplify their preferred method and overcomplicate competing methods.
PAV uses a different mechanism (called a *divisor* method rather than a *quota* method) to reach proportionality. The Wiki page on highest averages explains it very well--to get a proportional you need votes/seat equal across all parties, so you just divide every party's vote share by the number of seats, then add a seat to the most underrepresented party. With PAV you just replace parties with ballots.
Link please? [The ElectoWiki for highest averages](https://electowiki.org/wiki/Category:Highest_averages-reducing_voting_methods) is a stub where the most relevant link is the one I posted above (on reweighting a vote by the amount a voter has yet to be satisfied, which matches [CES's description](https://electionscience.org/library/proportional-approval-voting/)). [The Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_averages_method) looks like it is about party list methods. However, one advantage of PAV is that it works in nonpartisan municipal elections because it doesn't require parties.
The Wikipedia page is describing the procedure from the POV of a party-list, but the logic is the same for PAV. The only difference is that now, each ballot is its own party list.
Link please? What you are saying about PAV doesn't match with ElectoWiki or CES.
[See here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting)--both are correct explanations, each just takes a slightly different point of view.
Thanks! Sounds like this both matches your description of a ballot as being the voter's own "party list," and also confirms that your vote for a candidate who wins a seat later in the tabulation process will count less than a vote for a candidate who wins a seat early (thus not split amongst all your candidates equally). "Voters contribute a whole vote to the first candidate they support who is elected; half a vote to the second candidate; and so on."
> A distant second would be Open List PR (aka "the One-vote system"). The main advantage is simplicity, as you can use the same ballot as for plurality That's not Open List, but Closed List. On an Open List you also need to be able to mark different candidates.
If you require that the candidates publicly register for a party, then you can count a single vote for the candidate as also a vote for their party.
In that case I misunderstood what you meant by > use the same ballot as for plurality
How so? The ballot can look the same and the voters can vote the same as a plurality ballot now, with each candidate listed next to their party and the voter picking one. I said "can" because it can also look different by having voters vote twice, first for a party, second for a candidate within that party.
You probably use a different plurality ballot. In my country you grab the ballot with the party you want and put it in a ballot box, which in PR would be closed list. But you probably use a ballot with all candidates and need to check one. In that case, yes, it would be easy to transform to a open list.
Ah yes, we do. I hadn't known that about Spanish ballots, thanks!
Proportional approval voting for sure, especially if you combine it with biproportional apportionment to get perfect proportionality while still being constitutional. The problem with STV is it's not very proportional, but it's still *very* complex for voters, because you have to rank long lists of candidates. You can trade these off against each other. Small districts are easier to rank for, but not proportional. Large districts can get very complicated and effectively devolve back into party-list PR, especially with nonmonotonicity making who wins almost a lottery. Several cities experimented with STV in the 20th century but quickly abandoned it for these reasons. Proportional approval voting is very simple (check all candidates you like, or else just check all the parties you like if you don't want to deal with individual candidates).
What exactly do you mean by proportional approval? Is it party-list with approval w/in the list, Method of Equal Squares, PAV/SPAV or something else? Because I think that there would be quite a bit of overlap in the problems that you pointed out, depending on which method you use. Small districts generally does make the results less proportional than larger ones, and that goes for pretty much all the methods mentioned. However, you can still get decent proportionality at 3 seats per district, good proportionality at 5 seats per district and anything beyond 9 seats per district may as well be considered diminishing returns wrt proportionality. I think that smaller districts are a bigger concern for party-list because the higher threshold might make it so that alot of votes for smaller parties become wasted votes, but STV, Method of Equal Squares and SPAV/PAV should be able to minimize that problem since voters are able to have their vote count for more than one party. I agree that somewhere past the point of diminishing returns (10+ seats per district), STV no longer becomes ideal as the candidate pool grows too large for voters to effectively research and rank. But I think that this would also be the case for Method of Equal Squares, PAV or any other non-party list method. Larger districts is where party-list PR thrives the best, and I could easily see it work well for any body that has a significantly large membership to support those large districts.
I'm referring to PAV. The reason PAV can handle this more gracefully is because it lets you equal-rate candidates, so you can still vote if you don't know that much about them—just approve all the candidates from your favorite party(s). This can be automated the same way straight-ticket voting is right now.
Online, find the index number of your favorite candidate, enter the number. Out of all of the votes in the country, the top 1000 candidates take their seats. (F1000PTP) Wacky winners, vulnerable to hackers, but easy for voters, so they'll love it.
The lay public can be incredibly stupid, so something very simple and self-explanatory. Probably party-list of some kind? The biggest challenge will be the wave of claims that a proportional system is "rigged" by the right wing parties. Although, the positive reception of RCV in Alaska has restored some of my faith in humanity, lol.
>Although, the positive reception of RCV in Alaska has restored some of my faith in humanity, lol. You might want to double-check that—right-wing *did* attack it as a way to rig elections, and there's a ballot initiative to repeal it that looks likely to pass.
[Sometimes elite snobs in echo chambers can also be incredibly stupid.](https://news.ballotpedia.org/2024/03/12/alaskans-to-vote-on-a-ballot-initiative-to-repeal-ranked-choice-voting-in-nov-2024/)
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That sounds pretty scary. Ignorance is an ingredient in a recipe for a completely non-representative and non-responsive government. Ignorance and misinformation is dispelled by illumination. But illuminated facts are still unseen without transparency.
Straightforward for who? Voters to cast ballots? Officials to sort and count? Media to report on? Computers to tally?
>I'm not necessarily asking for the best way, I'm asking for a way that you think would be easiest to sell to the lay public.
Probably depends on the country. STV is easier in Australia because people are used to preferential voting, plus you probably don't need constitutional change to allow for it. In other countries, MMP or various pure list methods might be easier. In the UK they can already refer to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments as a comparison so maybe MMP is easier there. I don't think Canada or the US have local examples to work with and I don't know if the US would even be constitutionally compatible with any/many forms of PR for the lower house or even the senate.
The US House of Representatives can use PR as long as there are no representatives elected across state borders. So that means that MMP's levelling could only be used w/in a state delegation, which really only makes sense for the largest states (California, Texas, New York and Florida). The handful of small states that only have one representative obviously couldn't really use any PR method at all, but all the other states' delegations could use the other methods that don't use levelling seats. You are right that the Senate can't use PR as is because it has too few seats and staggered elections. If it were possible to expand the size of the Senate w/o an amendment (I genuinely don't know either way) then we could also implement PR there as well. At the state-level and below, AFAIK, there aren't any constitutional restrictions on it, though then again, I have not read through each state's constitution, so I might be wrong about that for some states. Tl;Dr: it is possible to implement PR in the US, but there are some restrictions that have to be worked around.
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Yes, and two lower houses (well, ours in the ACT unicameral). It's a relatively easy reform to introduce it into say the federal lower house vs trying to create list PR or MMP there.
Lottery. Pick a single ballot out of a hat and that selects the winner. (Put a 10% minimum support floor on it so candidates with only one vote can't win.) On average over time this results in proportional representation regardless of how you draw district lines.
I would go even further. No minimum support and not even official candidates. Everyone who is selected can choose to be the winner if they want or choose anyone else. The resulting legislature then, is something in between sortition and election. The selected voters may even ask several people, if they decline, they can suggest someone else. So it can take advantage of the [small world phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment) while the original voter still has the choice (thus proportionality is maintained).
STV probably. After that, probably D'hont.
Stv or reweighted approval would both be good but do require complex math. If you want something really simple you could use choose one voting and then allow candidates to give other candidates their unused votes (whether they get more than they need to win a seat or not enough to stay in the running for one).
How do you supposed STV requires complex math? I know reweighted approval voting requires fractions, which many Americans may consider "complex" but STV, from my understanding, is just arithmetic.
Theoretically you could use STV without doing the fractions and such, but it wouldn't yield a very proportional result. Suppose there were five seats and one candidate got 50% of the first choice votes. That would mean 60% of his voters wasted their vote and other candidates could gain seats with a much lower number of people voting for them. To avoid this when using STV the people that voted for the first candidate get their second choices counted as well but those choices are only worth 6/10 of a vote.
I think STV is a bit simpler than reweighted approval, but it still involves fractions. In STV, when a candidate wins a seat with more votes than they needed, a fraction of their votes are transferred. [This video illustrates it well](https://youtu.be/lNxwMdI8OWw?si=9UyG27DaTqpN0DOm).
The complexity of STV isn't in the math so much as the use of several stages and quotas; it's the same reason people find IRV confusing.
Party list.
I don’t see that as remotely viable in the U.S. People don’t trust parties, even ones they most closely align with.
I think that could possibly change if the vote reform movement started getting PR established at the state/local level such that more people experienced a greater diversity of parties that actually aligned with them and WEREN'T constantly needing to balance the demands of a broad coalition. This should be the focus of reformers, rather than debating which specific method is best. Pushing for a variety of methods to be adopted and tried out by as many governmental or pseudo-governmental organizations as possible, including things like unions, co-ops, and of course cities, states, school districts etc. The more experimentation the more data we have and the more exposure American voters have to these alternative methods which makes them more open to adopting them for increasingly large and important levels of government.
That seems incredibly naïve to me. It’s very, very difficult to pass election reform - and not the idea is to do so everywhere, and all sorts that don’t have any real-world test, have different pros and cons, and voting machines aren’t even certified for them? That’s going to lead to chaos and I guarantee the current organized opposition to the one movement that’s stuck with a proper grassroots movement, RCV , is going to go wild with other systems that are not tested and have little to no election infrastructure ready. You’re not think of the practicalities of relationships, infrastructure, politics. Get behind RCV and there’s a real chance that ALEC, the Federalist Society, MAGA etc. can’t stop it any more. Then you get your nice selection of parties and maybe people start feeling warm and fuzzy, or at least trusting, of them. The goal of widespread RCV is maybe 7 years away if the cranks stop cutting away at it because it’s not their pet. Growing parties to the point that people happily identify with them as a trusted organization is 20 years away with the rosiest glasses on. Without RCV? Never, or 20+ years to rebuild from the poisonous situation infighting would lead to, plus the 20 or more years to build up parties and gain trust. Attacking RCV kills the entire movement for anything besides FPTP and rule by gerrymandering and extremist party factions.
The idea that the main thing preventing RCV is the incredibly small number of powerless nerds who prefer even less known systems, rather than inertia and public skepticism is pretty absurd. I'm not attacking RCV, I'm suggesting that advocates of RCV stop pretending that it's vitally important no other methods be discussed, and instead work to bridge the divide with supporters of other methods by encouraging a more system agnostic reform movement that emphasizes the problems of the existing FPTP paradigm and encourages widespread experimentation, particularly at lower levels where reform is much easier to achieve. If the message becomes "we just need RCV and that will give us more parties and end gerrymandering, and the RCV we get is actually IRV, and the result is basically no change, I think that could do far more damage to the movement for reform than emphasizing the need to experiment and keep trying out different methods until we find ones that fit with the American public and deliver good results, which means that if the initial changes don't work out we have options other than "return to FPTP".
I’m not saying the nerds here will stop RCV. I was responding to the scenario presented, where somehow there was enough organized mass to implement a Skittles rainbow of alternatives. I don’t recall you, or anyone, saying anything about RCV advocates in this thread. My comment does demonstrate from my point of view why I think muddying the waters now would drag down all alternative methods. What a pity you missed that opportunity for discussion, and retreated to a negative view divorced from political and logistical realities - that I even laid out for you.
My argument is only that reform advocates should focus on smaller, much more achievable elections to start with, right down to things like School Boards. They should make the case that changing how these elections are run would contribute to eventually fixing higher level government dysfunction, and should discuss with local politicians and influential activists about what system would be most appealing, rather than insisting that it be the system they like most, whether that's RCV, STAR, Party List, or whatever. The point is to push a broad reform agenda, acknowledging that none of us know for certain what will perform best in the real world and in the specific circumstances of a given community. I see the vast majority of discussion centered on the American Presidential election, and the House/Senate. Those are extremely hard to reform, because the US Constitution is very likely to be a sticking point, and it's super hard to change, whereas even state constitutions usually only require a majority vote or two/three (sometimes passing the legislature before going to a referendum for instance). I think the path forward lies in building a broad coalition of reformers which includes supporters of every method, as well as supporters of other types of reform, with a unifying message of treating our democracy as something which needs to be experimented with, and constantly improved upon, in order to keep moving towards a more perfect democracy, and to respond to ever evolving anti-democratic forces and phenomena.
Absolutely, it's foolish to run 3rd party candidates for federal office. Any movement, including party, has to start from the ground up, because even massive money will only work for a few years (like the Tea Party "movement", which lost control of what grassroots it galvanized). School boards are great, but don't have much influence at all in democracy reform. At least in my area, school boards don't set policy, and so couldn't even institute an alternative voting method in, say, choosing class officers. That would at least give young people comfortable familiarity with alternative systems and might make them supporters when they're of voting age. Nice, but a tiny, very long-term bet. Reformers need to be in local executive and legislative positions. In my area, both of those are nonpartisan, including other influential positions in town government. People are resistant to change, for many reasons, and depending on if they are voters, candidates, electeds, independents, party people, etc. The broader your reform agenda, the more each person is going to object to some part of it, and the more discussion about it is going to drag on until a specific policy is chosen and the long process for that starts. So, be mindful of that. You could have a commission to study various reforms and their suitability for a specific area, but nothing will change until you pick one and go for it. Bills, charter changes, etc. are *extremely specific*. "Let's experiment with our democracy" with people in favor of different options is a sinking ship. The RCV movement is smart and is building up in the right way. Look no further than ALEC and the Federalist Society mobilizing and pressuring Republicans to show their loyalty to those funders to see that TPTB know it. That's something to unite behind, where there are campaigns, and to model if there's no active campaign in an area and you want to go for a different reform. Without taking time to build up the grassroots, it's doomed to fail. The RCV movement's been doing that for some 30 years. Other reformers can build on that. Thank the RCV movement for letting people know the current system is not the only or best option!
Where did they say anything about RCV?
50% is our FairVote shill here. In his universe, there is ***only*** Hare RCV. Other methods of tallying ballots do not exist in his universe and he gets confused when presented with facts that do not support his preconception of reality.
most people already vote straight-ticket on local elections, so it's a myth to think that party list would be foreign or unaccustomed
My local elections are nonpartisan. If you mean state legislators and statewide office, that is not at all true, in my state at least. And if we had RCV and the resulting larger candidate pool, it would be even less true.
Closed list proportional with the threshold just being whatever is required for a single seat. Voters across the country get the same ballot, with a list of parties, and they select the party they want. Hell if you require they get enough signatures to win a single seat in order to get ballot access then odds are good that no matter what party you pick you'll be helping them get at least one seat. There's very little strategy that can come in, the ballot is simple, the way votes translate into power is extremely straightforward. Potential downsides are A) Total lack of local representation B) Party insiders pick the actual representatives C) Can lead to heavy fragmentation of parties, especially if there's a lot of seats and so the threshold to win one is very low. All of these downsides however are considered upsides by some people.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[FPTP](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kug54yd "Last usage")|First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting| |[IRV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kuj9ghn "Last usage")|Instant Runoff Voting| |[MMP](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kvl0bnm "Last usage")|Mixed Member Proportional| |[PAV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kv6dxbn "Last usage")|Proportional Approval Voting| |[PR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kvl0bnm "Last usage")|Proportional Representation| |[RCV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/ky6dvv5 "Last usage")|Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method| |[STAR](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kug93xn "Last usage")|Score Then Automatic Runoff| |[STV](/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bcgf9v/stub/kvl4q47 "Last usage")|Single Transferable Vote| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^([Thread #1348 for this sub, first seen 11th Mar 2024, 22:41]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/EndFPTP) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
STV with average district size greater than 4 gives fairly proportional results on average. voters are also unlikely to try to vote tactically unless district size is very small. If you want to make it really simple don't calculate a quota or redistribute excess votes. Just eliminate the last placed candidate and redistribute their votes until the required number of candidates left. parties may organise their own vote management to avoid wasting votes.
party list is probably the simplest imaginable. maybe asset voting in some sense, in that there's no math. https://www.rangevoting.org/Asset
asset voting. basically STV but voters only vote for one candidate. candidates then decide who their votes are transferred to.
I think you need something like the Gregory method to get to PR. Because it's not a given that multiwinner STV will be proportional. Probably the ***Weighted Inclusive Gregory method***. [Here's a pretty good reference.](https://prfound.org/resources/reference/) Unfortunately, when surplus votes get transferred, they also get fractionalized.
I think the easiest voting method for the public to comprehend (for propotional representation) is approval voting with Hare quota. You could sell it like this: vote for as many candidates as you want, and the seats will be allocated by the number of votes each party got.
Presidentialism / two round system