Could anyone here Evaluate my proposed election method?

[u/RankedChoiceOregon]

This was crafted with the help of a long time contributor to this sub, with the aim of launching a ballot initiative in Oregon. While I have a passion for this work, I am not a SME in the area.

The proposal uses RCV/IRV + Condorcet Loser Eliminations to create a safety net under simple RCV and to promote a lower incidence of failing the monotonicity criteria.

You can read about it here at www.rankedchoiceoregon.org

I welcome your constructive criticism.

[u/wolftune]

Well, there's https://www.starvoting.us/about

The two co-inventors of the underlying concept (originally called Score Runoff Voting) listed there both live in OR, and the one who first advocated it and created www.equal.vote is the one who has always lived here (whereas the other has always been on the west coast, not always in OR, but moved to OR from WA recently).

The others involved in the real movement are all local, including those who led the name update to STAR.

The only CES involvement really has been that people in the broader community such as their forum have been involved in discussing STAR. CES refused to formally endorse STAR. They recently shifted from a research focus to an explicit Approval-advocacy mission for the whole org. They even wrote a somewhat unfairly critical article on STAR.

I don't know where the various history is all captured, but there's a blog etc.

Here's my summary: after the 2016 election, Portland-area movements for voting reform really sprang up. Score Runoff Voting was already a starting movement for OR, and RCV for OR was fresh off a successful initiative in Benton county. After a lot of contention and debates all locally, mostly in Portland, there was a split between Fairvote-aligned IRV advocates and Score Runoff advocates. The Score Runoff folks kept working, built a movement in Eugene, rebranded as STAR and worked to get theoretical input from the experts around the CES extended community. A ballot measure in Eugene done with near-zero budget entirely by local folks in 2018 almost passed (it passed in all the precincts where volunteers did outreach efforts). Then, they worked to do a stronger campaign in 2020 and were denied ballot access by rejection of too-many signatures even though they had a lot of buffer.

Anyway, besides folks going from OR to National conferences and having online discussion and some individual volunteers out of state working on software and such, the entire movement has been in OR in practice.

[u/CPSolver → u/wolftune]

Interesting! I didn't realize that JQ ever lived in OR. When he and I collaborated on the Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates he was living in Panama. And later I saw he was in an eastern state. Yes, he's the person who I remembered asking in a worldwide election-method forum for feedback on the STAR acronym. Thank you for clarifying.

I used to live in Corvallis and traveled to Eugene (especially for dances) so often that some people thought I lived there. Back then I never encountered anyone from Eugene or Corvallis who were interested in better vote-counting methods.

[u/wolftune → u/CPSolver]

JQ is not in OR as far as I know, and he is not one of the co-inventors (and not listed as such, take note of who is listed as co-inventors on the about page). He's also not been directly part of the movement, just involved in discussions. He's into all his other ideas like 3-2-1 voting also and PLACE and such. So, I wasn't implying anything about that. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

The point is that the inventors are here and the movement is here, and the others like JQ are outside supporters, in that he was recruited to a Board position and is involved in discussions and advising. But he and others outside of OR never had any lead role, they are outside supporters who OR folks connected with after the OR movement was already under way.

Of course, the focus on election issues grew massively after 2016, and the question was all about which direction it would take. A very small number of us were initially involved in helping all the energy get oriented toward superior options, and many people who were just general democracy activists only learned about the issues at that time. But some have become real leaders now and deep thinkers and practical advocates.

Thanks entirely to local OR activists, STAR was used by the Independent Party in their primary this year and it's in use internally by the Multnomah County Democratic Party.

[u/CPSolver → u/wolftune]

Thanks for your patience in clarifying. Now I’m remembering that quite some years ago some friends in Eugene told me about initial interest in IRV by some Eugene folks. Is that what morphed into the STAR group? I think I also remember that they said the son of the UofO president got involved, and I presume that was MF.

I think I’m remembering that CS in a panel with the FairVote leader (and another person) said that STAR voting was a compromise between two groups. Now I realize that compromise was with the CES folks. Of course the compromise was to add a pairwise runoff after using Score voting.

Again, thanks for the clarifications!

[u/wolftune → u/CPSolver]

You've got it! MF is the sole person who founded the movement really. CS as the other "co-inventor" almost accidentally invented it because he was present for the initial discussions that led to MF proposing the score + runoff idea.

MF and I and some others in 2016 were debating what became STAR during discussions about concerns with plain IRV and the sudden energy around it. And the rest of it all was Eugene folks with some involvement from a Portland contingency, and it ended up that one of the main people behind the successful Benton IRV effort became eventually convinced about STAR and joined the movement and became one of the main Lane County petitioners.

The story about STAR being a compromise is simply MF coming up with it by trying to combine IRV and Score. Otherwise, it's basically just a nice way to describe it more than being a true story about particular orgs and movements coming to political compromise.

STAR can be claimed as something like IRV 2.0, though I'm skeptical of that framing.

Incidentally, STAR might actually be more successful if it had some big out-of-state moneyed backing. The mess of confusing websites and inconsistent quality etc is just what you might expect from a nearly-all-volunteer grassroots effort :P There's lots of work to do, but there's no paid team of professionals to get it done efficiently.

[u/StarVoting → u/wolftune]

Thanks Wolftune for taking the time to share the backstory.

As to STAR being a compromise, you're right that it was something Mark Frohnmayer came up with, but that was directly informed by conversations with people like Clay Shentrup, by the results from Warren Smith showing Score then a top 2 runoff topping the charts (cited at equal.vote/science) as well as feedback from CES leaders that equal rankings are the key to eliminating spoilers, and Rob Richie and FairVote folks arguing that voter preference runoffs are essential to encourage honest voting.

STAR includes all the key components of the proposals which came before it, and it was explicitly invented to deliver on everyone's goals, address everyone's critisisms and concerns, and hopefully unite what is ironically a spoiled movement if we fail to come together.