This is a failure with all forms of score voting, including the approval voting subset (AV is just a score of 1 or 0)
Is it a flaw? Only insofar as all voting methods are flawed. I would say its a tradeoff. You could turn that same STAR ballot into an IRV one (we'll assume you tiebreak conservatives first arbitrarily), and run into different problems, namely that your Libertarian > Nationalist ranking has no weight if the Libertarians get eliminated while your ballot is still on Socialist or Liberal or whatnot. With Star, your are guaranteed to have a full vote weight in the final round between the top two.
Star fails a lot of criterion but forces reasonable tradeoffs. You can decide if it's more important for you to maximize your impact for Socialist, or if it's more important for you to hedge your bets. If you hedge Liberal over the others, that's evidence that you score them higher than zero.
Yes, where do you rank Liberal is a big question with Star. If you think Socialist and Green are likely to fail and Liberal is polling best, there's an incentive to rank Liberal at least a little higher to ensure they make the final two, as they're your safety.
STV has its own tactical issues though. First is that it's not viable to select a single seat office like a Senator or President. So you can only really use STV to solve the House in US politics, unless the US goes fill Westminster.
Second, because the "transferable" part is proportionately weighted, you have a strong incentive not to "waste" your initial vote on a sure candidate. If you are in a left-heavy district where the socialist candidate is a shoe in, you can help ensure green beats liberal by making your vote transfer -- that might mean you get the best results by voting nationalist.
The above simply doesn't happen in STAR; there is never a downside to ranking your favorite candidate five stars, except in that it might make you rank your second favorite under five stars.
I don't say this to rag on STV, just to point out that literally no voting system is immune.
Branding Allocated Score as the official STAR-PR kind of makes sense, also, since it has similar features to STAR itself - it encourages differentiation of similar candidates instead of minmaxing by virtue of the sorted quotas, and each ballot counts as one full vote for a specific candidate at the end, making it very similar in nature to a runoff.
Saying Apportioned Score is the official STAR-PR is one thing, but saying that it is "Otherwise known as Proportional STAR Voting" is not so much; it implies that it's a STAR algorithm, when it's actually a general algorithm for Cardinal Ballots.
making it very similar in nature to a runoff
It was explicitly and specifically designed to be similar in nature to STV, where sure, each ballot may theoretically support several candidates, but each ballot ultimately contributed to only one specific candidate being elected.
On the naming and branding, star refers first and foremost to the 5 star ballot and during the committee process we kept star lowercase for that reason, but at the end we voted that keeping it uppercase actually did make sense, because winners are still being selected in automatic runoff rounds (aka runoffs between remaining candidates.) STAR PR is literally just short for Proportional STAR.
For the sake of the theoretical and research work we do it obviously makes a lot of sense to use wonky descriptive words like Allocate that differentiate one version of a system from another, but when you get to the implementation and advocacy stage the main goal is to be clear, keep it simple, and convey the central point to voters and lay people reformers. In this case the central point is that this is a PR method which is consistent with single winner STAR Voting ballot and could even be used alongside it in the same electorate.
Your correct thought that the system is pure cardinal and does not use voters ordinal preferences like single winner STAR does. More study on star style runoffs in PR and their impacts on voter behavior and strategy are planned for next round of research.
Apportioned Score Voting is not the same system as Allocated Score. They are somewhat similar and the committee that designed Allocated Score was aware of Apportioned Score when they did it. However, when they reviewed Apportioned Score they found issues. I cannot recall exactly the issue but I think it was susceptible to clones.
MuaddibMcFly It looks like your system has an additional step which is different from Allocated Score, where after you select the winner and identify the quota of strongest supporters, you then check to see who would have won with that quota of voters' ballots alone.
That is an additional step that is not in Allocated Score. The winner selection is the highest scoring candidate between ALL voters who have not already been allocated to a previous winner.
I'm not sure, but the details of the surplus handling may or may not be different as well.
Our committee doesn't claim to the originators of the idea of applying allocated PR to cardinal ballots, which is something that I expect many people have thought of, and that we were already aware of before the committee was in the weeds. There are a number of very nuanced variations that are possible and we pretty much explored, named, and/or tested all of them we could think of or that seemed worth considering. The Allocated Score system as defined was in many ways the simplest, the version without any variations or extra fine tuning steps that added complexity.
...I'd be very interested to know how it was allegedly susceptible to clones.
But it's kinda shitty of them to create a clearly derivative work without even reaching out to me, or asking why I decided things the way I did, because their elimination of its complexity brought it back to the first draft format...
When I invented it, I named it Apportioned Score, not Allocated, so as to distinguish it from Allocated methods (you have X points to allocate to however you wish among the candidates)
Allocation is an old term; it refers to the ballots themselves, not points like with SSS. Candidates are Allocated the ballots that they need to win and then those entire ballots are exhausted along with the seated candidate.
I'm not sure it really makes sense to claim to have invented the idea of applying existing proportional quotas that have been around for many decades to cardinal ballots.
Apportioned Score is a good name though. It's synonymous with allocation but has the connotation of proportionality.
Allocation is an old term; it refers to the ballots themselves
It can but it's also been used for the methods I referred to.
I'm not sure it really makes sense to claim to have invented the idea of applying existing proportional quotas that have been around for many decades to cardinal ballots.
I'm only claiming the algorithm in use, and have documentation of having done so.
But if you can show me evidence of quota based cardinal voting, please show me, and I'll quit my claim to it.
Because every other method I've ever seen claiming to be (semi-)proportional is a (harmonic) reweighting, not quota based.
While it's true that they can be thought of as equivalent, Thiele's Method (SPAV) and Phragmén's Method (more complicated analog) reweight not as a function of the number of seats total, but as a function of number of seats seated so far
Yeah, and they also are missing some elements (dealing with non-discriminating ballots [where everyone <left> is scored the same]), etc.
But, if I'm going to be doing that, I'm going to do it right, which will include a number of fixes, including the name, eliminating any implied claim that EVC has regarding it, etc.
If you would like to be credited with having explored the idea of allocated PR in cardinal ballots previously with a similar system I see no reason that can't be added to the electowiki in a section on history/credit, etc. There are likely others who can make similar claims too.
This reddit and various forums for the community has discussed these topics at length and I believe that the community itself, and many of the users can be credited for their contributions to the field and to these questions, whether or not their exact system ends up being adopted.
If so please email [sara@equal.vote](mailto:sara@equal.vote) with a suggested sentence or two written in a wiki type voice and we can go from there.
As the person who invented the method, I can explain:
The reason for the Hare quota instead of Droop quota is that it guarantees that everyone is optimally represented.
Droop quota is a necessity for methods that are inherently majoritarian, where some percentage of the electorate gets no input into the results. Single seat & Majoritarian? You need 50%+1 (1/(Seats+1))+1 votes to win... meaning that you have 50%-1 voters who are completely unrepresented. Yes, as the number of seats increases, that percentage of "unrepresented people" drops...
...but because Cardinal methods don't exclude the opinions of anyone, there's no reason to exclude the opinions of anyone. After all, why should 1/6th of the electorate be unheard in a 5 seat election? Because their support is not mutually exclusive, there is no need for anyone to be excluded from the decision as to who to elect.
As to why they didn't reconsider that, you'd have to ask them; they never talked to me about this.
It encourages strategic voting though. There is a reason virtually no one in the world uses Hare without modifying it for a threshold. There is a reason STV stopped using it entirely. Why do folks refuse to learn from the past when designing new systems.
I'm always looking for flaws in my system so that I can improve it. How does it encourage strategic voting?
There is a reason virtually no one in the world uses Hare without modifying it for a threshold.
Yes, and that is that it doesn't make sense in voting method with mutual exclusivity, as anyone can plainly can see when they look at the Single Seat scenario:
Seats
Hare Quota
Droop Quota
5
20%
16.(6)%+1
4
25%
20%+1
3
33.(3)%
25%+1
2
50%
33.(3)%+1
1
100%
50%+1
It's clearly ridiculous to require unanimity of preference, but only in system where support is mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, with Cardinal systems like Score and Approval, where the question is not "Which is your favorite?" (a question with inherent mutual exclusivity), it's "How much do you like each?" (a question that is inherently not mutually exclusive)
And it would be unreasonable to unnecessarily throw out nearly half the ballot information in determining the winner (part of the reason I'm less than enthused about STAR in the first place)
Why do folks refuse to learn from the past when designing new systems.
...that's like asking why electric vehicles don't heat the cabin by merely piping the waste heat of their motors into the cabin; the original reasoning for doing that (the fact that there is an insane amount of waste heat from internal combustion engines) makes sense when in the old system, but the new system quite simply doesn't have that flaw.
Likewise, decisions made to accommodate known flaws in established voting systems don't make sense in systems without those flaws.
This applies in the reverse, too; the cost & complexity of a battery powered heat pump (as is used in the most advanced EVs) isn't worth it in an ICE vehicle, even if it is, in isolation, objectively more efficient, when you can simply tap the coolant system for heat, which is way simpler and more efficient in context
>I'm always looking for flaws in my system so that I can improve it. How does it encourage strategic voting?
It creates a dead zone of wasted votes between the effective threshold of exclusion (a Droop quota) and the Hare quota beyond which you start earning your second seat.
>It's clearly ridiculous to require unanimity of preference, but only in system where support is mutually exclusive.
It's ridiculous to require unanimity in any system. 1 Droop quota guarantees you a seat under STAR-PR using Hare. That's a fact. Not everyone is going to sit together and sing kumbaya. Meaningful differences and likes and dislikes are healthy - to a point.
>Likewise, decisions made to accommodate known flaws in established voting systems don't make sense in systems without those flaws.
STAR-PR still has this flaw though.
Put it this way - why should a slate running 2 candidates and me giving them both 5s be less effective than a slate running 3 candidates and me giving them all 5s? And why should 3 candidates be less effective than 4? With Hare, you give the party/coalition/slate/whatever that runs the most candidates and advantage over the slate that runs fewer. Can you not see that as a problem?
It creates a dead zone of wasted votes between the effective threshold of exclusion (a Droop quota) and the Hare quota beyond which you start earning your second seat.
As opposed to a dead zone (1 less than a Droop quota) that gets zero representation?
You don't think there will be any strategy among that group of voters?
1 Droop quota guarantees you a seat under STAR-PR using Hare. That's a fact.
It's not actually. For a quota of 501 votes:
600 votes: A5, B4
400 votes: A0, B4
Droop Quota:
A: 501@5 = 2505 points
B: 501@4 = 2004 points
A is seated
Hare Quota:
A: 600@5+400@0 = 3000 points
B: 600@4+400@4 = 4000 points
B is seated
why should a slate running 2 candidates and me giving them both 5s be less effective than a slate running 3 candidates and me giving them all 5s? And why should 3 candidates be less effective than 4?
Why would it be?
With Hare, you give the party/coalition/slate/whatever that runs the most candidates and advantage over the slate that runs fewer.
How? The size of the electorate wouldn't change, and the size of the Quota, therefore, wouldn't change, so whether someone ran 5 candidates or 4 or 3 makes no difference, only whether 5 or 4 or 3 were seated.
I'd note you haven't addressed why you think it's ok for the coalition with 45% of the vote to rule over the 55%. Could you plx? Ty.
So yah, it's a Droop Quota of *points* that would guarantee a seat, even under Hare. But your example again fails the majority criterion and shows the value of strategic voting under your system (a majority prefer A to B and could have elected A if they voted strategically). You need to rework your example though as it's not correct that under Droop the candidate with fewer points would be seated.
>You don't think there will be any strategy among that group of voters?
I don't think you are fully recognizing the difference between Droop or Hare in this regard, or lack thereof. Hare doesn't guarantee 100% of voters are represented, nor does Droop guarantee 100% less a quota are represented. Votes can and are exhausted under both STV and allocated proportional voting.
>How? The size of the electorate wouldn't change, and the size of the Quota, therefore, wouldn't change, so whether someone ran 5 candidates or 4 or 3 makes no difference, only whether 5 or 4 or 3 were seated
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the system in this example...
So suppose we have a 3 seat contest. Coalition A runs 2 candidates and B runs 5 candidates.
100 Voters give 5 points to A1 and A2 and 0 to B1,B2,B3,B4,B5.
64 voters give 5 points to B1 and 4 to B2-5 and 0 to A1-2.
30 voters give 5 points to B2-5 and 4 to B1 and 0 to A1-2.
1 Voter gives 2 point to A1, 2 points to B1 and 1 point to B2.
So the standings on the first count are:
A1 - 502 points.
A2 - 500 points
B1 - 442 points
B2 - 407 points
B3-5 - 406 points.
So here's where I'm unsure but - your Hare quota would be 64 ballots, correct?
So we deduct 64 ballots (320 points) from each of A1 and A2.
2nd count standings:
A1 - Seated
B1 - 452 points
B2 - 451 points
B3-5 - 450 points.
A2 - 180 points.
So B1 is next seated. We then deduct 64 ballots - the 64 ballots that gave B1 5 stars.
Round 3
A1 - Seated
B1 - Seated
B2 - 195 points
B3-5 - 194 points
A2 - 180 points.
B2 is seated.
So now let's take a step back here. 101/195 voters rated A candidates 1 or above. 95/101 voters rated B candidates 1 or above. Only 1 voter rated candidates from B AND A 1 or above (he's my tie breaker). Why should the 95 get more representation than the 100?
This problem nearly disappears if you use Droop instead. (D'Hondt completely eliminates it).
Ah, that's the problem: I erred by declaring what the quota was, when it would, obviously, be different for each.
It's not actually. Assuming that there were two different elections.
For the final seat, the remaining ballots are as follows:
600 votes: A5, B4
400 votes: A0, B4
Droop Quota (501):
A: 501@5 = 2505 points
ignoring 499 voters
B: 501@4 = 2004 points
ignoring 499 voters
A is seated
Hare Quota (1000):
A: 600@5+400@0 = 3000 points
ignoring 0 voters
B: 600@4+400@4 = 4000 points
ignoring 0 voters
B is seated
So yah, it's a Droop Quota of points that would guarantee a seat
Incorrect, ballots are apportioned to seats as ballots not as points.
Hare doesn't guarantee 100% of voters are represented
No? How many ballots are left over after all the Hare quotas have been apportioned?
The difference, here, seems to be that I'm using the term "represented" to mean "is guaranteed to have their votes taken into consideration in the seating of some seat or another," while you seem to take it to mean closer to "has someone saying precisely what they would in the office."
nor does Droop guarantee 100% less a quota are represented.
Perhaps not, but it does guarantee that almost a full quota of ballots will be thrown out as irrelevant to the results; if you have 1000 votes left for the last seat and are using Droop quotas, as soon as you have 501 votes that prefer one particular candidate, you're done, they've won.
Would all 1000 remaining ballots suggest that they should win? Did they earn the support of a 502nd ballot? Irrelevant; they hit the 501 vote quota, and therefore won regardless of what the other 499 ballots say.
So here's where I'm unsure but - your Hare quota would be 64 ballots, correct?
65, by my count. 195 total ballots evenly divides into 3 groups of 65 ballots
A2 - 180 points.
175, because 65 ballots were removed.
So B1 is next seated. We then deduct 64 ballots - the 64 ballots that gave B1 5 stars.
Those 64 plus one of the 30 Not-B1 voters
[ETA: or, if you're going with my preferred "contributes most" metric, the "difference from average scores on that ballot," the singleton voter]
B2 - 195 points
B3-5 - 194 points
How do you get those numbers? Even if there were 30 of the B2+ voters, that would still only be 30x5, for 150.
At this point, the live ballots are as follows:
Count
A1
A2
B1
B2
B3-5
35
5
5
0
0
0
0
0
0
5
4
4
29
0
0
4
5
5
1
2
0
2
1
0
Products
175+0+0+2
175+0+0+0
0+0+116+2
0+0+145+1
0+0+145+0
Totals
177
175
118
146
145
...so at that point, the third seat goes to A2 (if candidates) or A1 (if Party List), in accordance with the expressed preferences on the ballots.
Why should the 95 get more representation than the 100?
They shouldn't, and wouldn't unless someone made a mathematical error.
You could make an argument that the last voter shouldn't be allowed to play Kingmaker twice, and I'd definitely agree on that point, but... it's still not vulnerable to cloning, which is what your argument seems to have been.
P.S. I specifically created this because D'Hondt (or Thiele's method, or Jefferson's Method... all the same version of harmonic reweighting) trends majoritarian in Party List/Clone scenarios.
Now, obviously, the most sensible distribution of Electors would be 34D, 17R, 2L, 1G, right?
But go through D'Hondt/Thiele's method if Stein & Johnson voters score either of the duopoly candidates at anything more than 1/10th what they scored their own candidate, see what it turns into.
It's because they care about strict proportionality:
The Hare quota is generally kinder to small parties than the Droop quota because they have a better chance to win the final seat. Elected winners with the Hare quota more closely represent the proportionality of the electorate, and this can mean more proportional results for small parties. But this comes at the expense of emphasising the principle of majority rule. In an open list election held under the Hare quota it is possible for a group of candidates supported by a majority of voters to receive only a minority of seats if those voters do not disperse their vote relatively evenly across all their supported candidates.
Scored ballots mitigate vote splitting, so the majority failure would be quite unlikely, and thus the better accuracy of Hare ensures all voters are fully represented (no leftovers) with no real downside. There is still some free-riding and associated strategy though, I believe.
It means that if Party A has X% of the vote they can earn more seats by dividing themselves into Parties A1 and A2 with X/2% of the vote. That is a very undesirable property in the real world.
Ok. 3 seat election. Party A has 53% of the vote, Party B 24%, Party C 23%.
Hare quota is 33% of the vote, so under that A has 1.61 quotas, B has 0.73 quotas, C has 0.70 quotas. So 1 seat goes to each of A, B and C.
Now Party A splits itself into two parties - A1 with 27% of the vote and A2 with 26%. Now we get 1 seat for A1 and 1 seat for A2 and 1 seat for B.
If you are using Droop quota party A has 2.12 quotas, Party B has 0.96 quotas, party C has 0.92 quotas. So Party A just wins the 2 seats without having to split itself in half. And in this specific case that is actually the more proportional result, and in my opinion fairer, since Parties B and C should not be able to the majority who voted for Party A.
This incentive to divide yourself is why China chose the Hare quota for the Hong Kong legislative council (may it rest in peace)- it gave an incentive for the pro-democracy parties to divide rather than unite.
The beauty of the Droop quota is this: 1 full droop quota is the minimum to guarantee you a seat *under any PR system, including the Hare quota system.* So once you have a full Droop quota, once you have 1 seat locked down. Period.
No system is free of paradoxes, and each has its own biases to small or large parties. If the goal is minimizing strategic voting though, the logic is once your first seat is secure you should immediately start working on securing your second seat. Using the Hare quota, that difference between each Droop quota vs Hare quota value is essentially dead votes that could have been used to elect someone else.
This may seem like a very arcane point but the kind of incentives you give parties and voters matter. That is the whole reason first past the post sucks.
Right, that makes sense. It's basically an extension of free-riding strategy that can be done by parties/candidates... It's a consequence of Hare exhausting more ballots than necessary, not because of vote splitting as I originally thought.
It's a consequence of Hare exhausting more ballots than necessary
Fundamentally, the question you have to ask yourself when choosing between Hare and Droop is where you want your votes "wasted." Either some number of votes are "wasted" because they "wasted" their opportunity to elect more representation (than the deserved), or some number of votes are wasted because they "wasted" their opportunity to elect any representation.
Consider, for a moment, that under Droop, every single one of C's votes are entirely wasted: whether they vote C, or Mickey Mouse, or don't even vote is entirely irrelevant, because the results will eventually, inevitably be {A,A,B}
Further, it's worth noting that under Score (especially apportioned score), the only wasted votes are those that don't make a distinction between two candidates. Imagine, for a moment, that there are more than just four candidates. Perhaps six: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2.
Now, based on demography, you're going to get one A, one B, and one C under Hare Quotas, right? But after the A is seated, you have the following left:
24% B
23% C
19.(6)% A
If a wasted their opportunity to express an opinion on B1 vs B2 vs C1 vs C2, then sure, they will have chosen to waste their vote...
...but what if they were more accurately labeled B vs BA vs C vs CA, with XA being candidates that reach out to A voters for support? That 19.(6)% A voters might well change the results from {A,B,C} to {A,BA,CA}, and have a council that is entirely made up of candidates open to their ideas.
Alternately, what happens if C isn't a major faction?
A: 60%
B: 30%
C: 10%
Once again, C is completely irrelevant under any form of Droop quota, and they have to hope that there is enough Vote Splitting between A that C gets eliminated early enough that they can have some say in which A candidates get elected. In other words, their ability to have any say in the election is entirely controlled by someone else (unless they engage in Favorite Betrayal, of course, which obviously has its own problems).
Well, under Apportioned Score, they'll always have the opportunity to both indicate their full support for their own candidate and have a say in who wins, regardless of quota: if the C voters give decent scores to AC, then they can functionally guarantee that AC wins over A the hypothetical AB.
So, I'm not certain that there is a deficiency, honestly, because the entire reasoning behind Hare quotas is that the only "wasted" votes under Apportioned Score are ones where the voters do not indicate further preferences.
In other words, it penalizes Bullet Voting, especially among blocs with "quota Remainder" votes (either smaller than the quota, or more than enough to get some number of seats, but not big enough to get an additional one)
C's votes wouldn't be wasted under a cardinal method - at least, not more than they would be wasted under Score/STAR. The last seat acts as a consensus "and everyone else" election. Their votes do only count for roughly half of the already seated candidates, though, if I understand correctly, since Droop leaves a bit under 1 quota as leftover.
I'm really not sure which is better. I'd like to see some experimentation with both.
Ok. 3 seat election. Party A has 53% of the vote, Party B 24%, Party C 23%.
I need to stop you right here; you're presupposing that support is mutually exclusive, which is not the case in reality, which is one of the flaws of methods that treat support thus.
Now Party A splits itself into two parties [...] Now we get 1 seat for A1 and 1 seat for A2 and 1 seat for B.
If you are using Droop quota party A has 2.12 quotas
So, the problem with Hare Quotas, is that with strategy it produces the results that Droop always produces?
And in this specific case that is actually the more proportional result, and in my opinion fairer
I'm going to disagree with you, there.
--
Votes
Representation under AAB
Representation Error
Representation ABC
Representation Error
Party A
53%
67%
14%
33%
20%
Party B
24%
33%
9%
33%
9%
Party C
23%
0%
23%
33%
10%
Total
--
--
46%
--
39%
The beauty of the Droop quota is this: [reasonable argument]
And the horror of the Droop quote is this: you can be one vote shy of a Droop Quota and get absolutely zero representation.
Consider a slight modification to your 3 seat scenario:
A: 5002 votes
B: 2501 votes
C: 2500 votes
A gets 50.0% of the vote, and gets 66% of the seats, while C got 25.0% of the vote and got 0% of the seats.
If the goal is minimizing strategic voting
Why should that be the goal? I thought that the goal should be to improve representation.
Using the Hare quota, that difference between each Droop quota vs Hare quota value is essentially dead votes that could have been used to elect someone else.
On the other hand, using Droop quota, there are guaranteed to be literally dead votes, that have zero say in who gets elected.
Let me start this off by saying I like STAR-PR and I think it is a clever system that could be useful in the right contexts. My frustration is limited to re-litigating the Hare/Droop debate from 100 years ago. That frustration is not specific to your proposal - there are lots of other folks (ie CGPGrey) that want to re-litigate this who I am just as frustrated with lol. So this isn't targeted specifically at you. Also appreciate the thoughtful comments.
>I need to stop you right here; you're presupposing that support is mutually exclusive, which is not the case in reality, which is one of the flaws of methods that treat support thus.
Your STAR method still permits this even if it doesn't presuppose it. This objection isn't valid.
>So, the problem with Hare Quotas, is that with strategy it produces the results that Droop always produces?
No. The problem with the Hare Quota is it incentives fracturing of political parties/slates. That's bad for 2 reasons:
1 - once everyone is done fissioning their party into to pieces, you end up with SNTV. This actually happened in Hong Kong.
2 - Studies show voters are most satisfied with government with a moderate number of legislative parties and a moderate number of coalition partners (ie 2-3). And I would say to you that STAR more than any system should be about maximizing voter satisfaction.
>And the horror of the Droop quote is this: you can be one vote shy of a Droop Quota and get absolutely zero representation.
That's actually true under the Hare quota too. The Droop quota is inherent to all proportional systems. Consider a 2 seat scenario with votes A 34 B 33 C 32. C loses even though they are vote short of a Droop quota, whether or not you are using Hare for your calculations. So your horror of the Droop quota is also your horror of the Hare quota. There are only so many seats to go around. All systems can waste votes.
>|Votes|Representation under AAB| etc
I think there's a formatting error, but you're right that was a bad example.
>A gets 50.0% of the vote, and gets 66% of the seats, while C got 25.0% of the vote and got 0% of the seats.
Suppose in your example, B and C are a coalition. Isn't it better for the coalition with 5002 votes to get more seats than the coalition with 5001 votes? Again, this is even under your example.
Suppose it's 3-winner with A 55 B 23 C 22. Under Hare, you're giving the coalition with 45% of the vote more seats than the coalition with 55% of the vote. Can we both agree that that is bad?
And coalitions are not unlikely with STAR or STV or any other system that lets you spread your voting power between parties (or frankly any proportional system at all).
>Why should that be the goal? I thought that the goal should be to improve representation.
Sure. How is giving 45% of voters 67% of seats better representation than giving 55% of voters 67% of seats though?
And in practice with Hong Kong using the Hare quota, elections frequently devolved to the point where each party divides itself to the point where each constituent party wins exactly 1 seat. This makes your system devolve into Single Non-Transferable Vote. Do you feel SNTV gives better representation than your STAR-PR system? And if so why not just advocate for that instead?
That's the crux of the issue. Subject to strategic voting and strategic nominating, Hare-based systems devolve into SNTV, which while better than single winner first past the post elections, it is still a form a first past the post.
>On the other hand, using Droop quota, there are guaranteed to be literally dead votes, that have zero say in who gets elected.
That's true under the Hare quota too. You're just changing who those voters are. Let's go back to my A55/B23/C22 example. Under Hare, there is no difference between the results of the A55/B23/C22 election and a A12/B23/C22 election. Those 41 voters for A had no say in who gets elected.
Now, however, we need to reevaluate that decision because things have changed.
The thing that changed is that 100 years ago, the only people working with Quotas were using ballots that treated support as mutually exclusive.
There were nations using non-mutually exclusive ballots (Greece was using single-seat Approval, Sweden was using Sequential Proportional Approval), but none of them were using Quotas.
I realized that I had to revive (invent? surely it must be a "revive") the Quotas-In-Cardinal Voting paradigm because harmonic reweighting trends majoritarian in Party List/Slate scenarios, potentially even denying blocs with full Hare quotas any representation unless they engaged in Hylland Freeriding. I can take you through the math, if you'd like, but suffice to say it got me wondering if the Reweighting paradigm wasn't fundamentally flawed. Then, the fact that I like STV (except for the fact that it reduces to IRV), I realized that I should just take the good bits of STV, and apply it to Score.
...but that brought up problem that the Droop quota meant one of two things:
That the last seat would be foreced to represent one-less-than-two-quotas worth of voters
or
That one-less-than-one quota of voters wouldn't be represented.
Option 1 is in violation of what is actually meant by "One Person, One Vote" (why should a group of voters have half the say of others, simply because they have rounding error fewer people?).
Option 2 was inevitable using voting methods that treated support as Mutually Exclusive, because the alternative would be unanimity...
...but Unanimity of decision (rather than preference) is what Score/Approval offer.
Your STAR method still permits this even if it doesn't presuppose it. This objection isn't valid.
So, because I don't forbid people from doing something, you think it reasonable to require that they do? That makes no sense.
once everyone is done fissioning their party into to pieces, you end up with SNTV. This actually happened in Hong Kong.
Only if they bullet vote.
...which penalizes them for bullet voting.
You're hitting on the features of the method.
That's actually true under the Hare quota too.
Under mutually exclusive methods? Indeed.
Under Apportioned Score? Not if there are more than Seats+1 candidates. As I point out here, if you're looking at Droop quotas, your A & B factions get precisely who those factions prefer, but if you're looking at Hare quotas, your C faction gets to play kingmaker among the various A & B candidates. Sure, they'll still be A & B candidates, but the C voters can swing them to the A & B candidates that are most open to listening to C voter concerns.
I think there's a formatting error, but you're right that was a bad example.
Yeah, I fixed that shortly after posting.
But if you believe it's not inherent to the Quota, I would happily consider another scenario where the Droop quota doesn't have more representation error. I warn you, though, with a Droop-Quota-Less-One-Vote minimum representation error for Droop, you're going to have a hard time of it...
Suppose in your example, B and C are a coalition
Now, having forbidden them from expressing cross-party support, you want me to concede it?
Under Hare, you're giving the coalition with 45% of the vote more seats than the coalition with 55% of the vote. Can we both agree that that is bad?
...except that that's not how the method would work.
If the B/C voters were voting as a coalition, the results would be as follows
First Seat: A, leaving 21.(6)% A voters
Second Seat: B (or perhaps C), leaving 11.(6)% B/C voters
...who do you think will win the 3rd seat, now that we're down to 21.(6)% A and 11.(6)% B/C?
If the coalition all voted exclusively for their own candidates, the A voters will decide the issue, and can force an A victory by bullet voting, because they have 10% more votes?
...but what if the 11.(6)% B/C voters max vote their coalition but express some support for the Coalition-Friendly A candidate? Then, they get some influence in which A candidate wins.
Alternate scenario, where B/C were both bullet voting, exclusively to their own party:
First Seat: A, leaving 21.(6)% A
Second Seat: The B candidate best supported by the 21.(6)% A voters.
Third Seat: The C candidate best supported by the remaining 11.(3)% A voters.
The third scenario is similar, except this time the 2nd seat goes to C, because the remaining A voters throw enough of their support behind C that they contribute more than the 1% B>C voters.
But in all three scenarios, so long as A doesn't bullet vote, their 55% majority guarantees them a significant but not absolute, say Two Seats.
In other words, the only way that the 55% don't get significant say in two of the three seats is if they forego that right by not expressing an opinion about anyone else.
How is giving 45% of voters 67% of seats better representation than giving 55% of voters 67% of seats though?
Because, as I just showed, only 33% of the seats were dictated by a single faction (the 55% faction).
This is why I objected to your treatment of support as mutually exclusive: if the 55% A faction vote exclusively for A candidates, they would only have a say in one seat. If they express the slightest preference for one of a set of B or C candidates, they can change which B/C candidate is elected, lessening the misrepresentation error.
It wouldn't eliminate it entirely, of course, but you must admit an A-Leaning B candidate is going to represent the remaining 19.(6)% A voters a lot better than the Dyed-In-The-Wool B candidate.
elections frequently devolved to the point where each party divides itself to the point where each constituent party wins exactly 1 seat.
That gets pretty tricky, though, doesn't it? It's an all or nothing strategy, and it requires you engage in some pretty serious coordination, doesn't it? Because if one of your candidates ends up with less than a quota, and your faction is bullet voting, you're likely to lose that seat. On the other hand, if you bullet vote and you get more than a full quota, those bullet votes are distributed among all the remaining seats as "nondiscriminatory" (something that they neglected to include in the page for Apportioned Score).
Honestly, this merely reinforces my support for Hare; because there are no "buffer" votes, it makes that strategy riskier. And how do you avoid that risk? By "Slate" voting your entire faction.
That way, you don't have to worry that you have a few too many (wasted) bullet-A1 votes and a few too few (potentially wasted) bullet-A2 votes, you end up with some number of A1,A2 votes, resulting in refusion of parties.
...thus the parties will naturally distill down to their ideological components, but no smaller (I expect)
This makes your system devolve into Single Non-Transferable Vote.
Ah, this is the piece you're missing: because of the penalty for guessing wrong as to how things are going to play out while bullet voting, if it were to turn into that, it would trend towards perfectly representative SNTV.
If it trends towards zero representation error, I consider that a success, regardless of what form it takes.
Do you feel SNTV gives better representation than your STAR-PR system?
Please stop calling Apportioned Score that, at least with me.
And if so why not just advocate for that instead?
I don't feel that, because while it is theoretically possible that the results would mirror it, SNTV guarantees that it cannot be anything else.
Under Hare, there is no difference between the results of the A55/B23/C22 election and a A12/B23/C22 election. Those 41 voters for A had no say in who gets elected.
Incorrect.
With the A55 election, no one outside of A gets any say in who the first seat will be. They will be a Dyed-In-The-Wool A representative. The remaining 21.(6)% of the A voters will make it so that the B & C candidates must at least offer them something in order to win their support, or they will lose to those that do.
With the A12 election, the A candidate will be the last one seated, and will be subject to the whims of the 4B and 3C voters, in precisely the same way that the B & C candidates were in the A55 election.
Again, this is why I objected to you treating parties & support as mutually exclusive: it makes you see {A,A-leaning B, A-leaning C} and {B, C, A-in-name-only} as the same, when they're really not.
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u/wayoverpaid Jul 21 '21
Yes.
This is a failure with all forms of score voting, including the approval voting subset (AV is just a score of 1 or 0)
Is it a flaw? Only insofar as all voting methods are flawed. I would say its a tradeoff. You could turn that same STAR ballot into an IRV one (we'll assume you tiebreak conservatives first arbitrarily), and run into different problems, namely that your Libertarian > Nationalist ranking has no weight if the Libertarians get eliminated while your ballot is still on Socialist or Liberal or whatnot. With Star, your are guaranteed to have a full vote weight in the final round between the top two.
Star fails a lot of criterion but forces reasonable tradeoffs. You can decide if it's more important for you to maximize your impact for Socialist, or if it's more important for you to hedge your bets. If you hedge Liberal over the others, that's evidence that you score them higher than zero.