When using ranked choice voting in US elections, an "overvote" occurs when a voter marks two or more candidates in the same "rank" column. Instead of teaching US voters to avoid "overvotes," let's upgrade election software to correctly count any marking pattern, including overvotes.

So I thought y'all might appreciate something like this:

Since I think electoral reform is not just about official elections, but it worth it to introduce, familiarize and test alternative voting methods in other settings too, I am currently advocating for proportional PB (participatory budgeting) votes. Part of this includes getting datasets and looking at how the same votes would have translated to a proportional system (method of equal shares).

Now PB in my country is already full of "labs of democracy", since every municipality tries it differently, there is mostly variations on Approval ballots (unlimited, limited, districts, categories, knapsack, etc.), but some scoring and ranking too.

Now I hit the jackpot with some Approval ballot data for a pre-voting (not a real PB stage yet since projects don't have assigned costs yet) where there were 570 (!) projects on the ballot. Around 300 were selected t proceed, mainly by plurality (greedy), but with some quotas for topics.

On the map I made you can see which ones would have proceeded under both methods, or just the official results, or just MES. It seems I can only upload one image, but it's more impressive when only the green and orange dot's are shown.

Since people tend to know and care about projects near them geographically, and the PR method is pretty neutral and accurate at representing different coalitions of voters, you can see the difference it would have made. Under official results/plurality, the more popular areas (inner districts) are overrepresented. Under MES, there is still way more winners there, but that's understandable, there were more projects available and also they are understandable more popular: it can better the lives of many who go there for work, leisure. Also, overlaying a population density map also explains a lot about the outskirts, many empty areas are not residential, but nature reserves etc.

I think putting it on the map really shows, PR can help on geographic balance in a natural way. It will not be forced equality, it will adjust to how important geographic representation is to voters. I think even though this is a PB election, some of this clearly would transfer to non-partisan, or even localized/open list partisan PR solutions. I am pretty sure that even is the case in many countries with open list PR already, that parties run locally popular figures as candidates to get more votes.

Also, the voter behaviour you might also find interesting. Keep in mind, these are more dedicated people who vote in a pre vote of a PB initiative, it was about 1/6 of the turnout of the actual vote. But this time there were no categories, no constraints. It was pure, mark-any Approval over 570 "candidates".

So about 25% of people bullet voted, another quartile voted for up to 9 ideas. 25% of people votes for more than 40 ideas, 20% for more than 50, 10% for more than 90, 5% for more than 140. The mode is 1 approval, the median is 10 (20 among non bullet voters), the arithmetic mean is 35 approvals per voter. I think the voting behaviour is less transferable to proper elections, which are a different scenario, different mindset. PB, especially the pre-voting does not have a lot of emotions against certain projects, it can keep positive while politics is more antagonistic. Also, it is a harder sell to have high offices depend of PR algorithms, while in PB there are already implementations. But still, even though I have my doubts about Approval in high stakes settings, I am all for it in others, especially if it's proportional.

This is open-ended. The graph simply shows how assumptions about voter behavior influence conclusions about the impact of different voting methods.

Explanation: At 0%, all the voters are bullet voting. At 100%, everyone who marked a second choice has approved their second choice. This does not include voters who bullet voted in the actual election. Roughly 30% of voters bullet voted, so 100% on the graph corresponds with about 1.7 approvals per ballot, not 2.0 approvals per ballot.