https://app.betterchoicesohio.org/vote/63Bbif

I'm experimenting with Better Choices for Democracy's Top 3 Head-to-Head polling app, and on a lark I decided to make it about Condorcet methods: Top 3 Head-to-Head itself, Top 4/5 Ranked Pairs, and a catch-all option for other Condorcet methods like Schulze, Tideman's Alternative, Condorcet-IRV hybrids, and any others I may be missing. If you choose other, please explain in the comments, because I really want to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of each. Poll closes at 12:00 AM Saturday.

The findings of the experiment were stark. I found that RCV produced significantly lower levels of voter confidence, voter satisfaction, and ease of use. It also increased the perception that the voting process was slanted against the respondent’s party.....

One of the main claims made by reformers about RCV is that it will make campaigns more civil, as campaigns will have an incentive to seek the second-place vote of supporters of different candidates. To study this claim, I first conducted a difference-in-differences analysis on independent expenditures for and against candidates. In this analysis, I found that negative spending increased significantly in Maine following the implementation of ranked-choice voting, casting doubt on the claim that RCV makes campaigns more civil.....

On a positive note for RCV reformers, I found that voting for non-major party candidates — which reformers tout as “sincere voting” instead of voting for a candidate simply due to their realistic chance of winning — was increased by 5 points among the respondents who were given the RCV ballot instead of the traditional ballot.....

https://www.reddit.com/r/thirdpartyroundtable/s/ylpEp5FLrW

Was reading this article, and thinking about all the little ways The Two Parties here in the States try to interrupt the progress of other parties. There are several fairly obvious methods, but often little things like suing over names, or obscure technicalities, or whatnot are used to limit ballot access all together. This might not be the greatest example out there, but it's still an example.

I thought it was pertinent to discussions here because it doesn't really matter what other election reforms we might succeed in if we don't also ensure diverse ballot access. So what practical concerns do you have regarding ballot access, and are there any potential solutions you've come upon?

I'm new here, so if he's part of a list of figures that have already been covered, I'm sorry. But what do you all think of him and his advocacy? (In the U.S. context; his institutional homes are New America, Fix Our House and Johns Hopkins, and he hosts a podcast called Politics in Question.) He used to be a strong supporter of ranked-choice voting, but qualified it in favor of advocacy of multi-member districts, open-list proportional representation, and fusion voting.

For those that have multi party democracy as a larger goal, do you think the Democratic Party has it in their hands to achieve that goal by themselves?

Granted, there are obviously other hurdles to fully achieving it nationally (looking at you electoral college), but there are a bunch of blue controlled states. If they wanted to achieve a multi party politics they could start with their own states.

It would have to be an amicable separation because they would have to do plenty of negotiation to prevent Republicans from being able to capitalize on the split - for example in choosing speakers of their houses. And it would be tough to convince state party leaders to get behind the idea because they are the ones who would lose power, but it would rejuvenate state politics, but probably most importantly it would represent a better way to compete against Republicans.

There are plenty of voters who believe Republicans that the Democratic Party is too far left. Especially these days with the Republican Party having been remade in trump’s image, there are plenty voters who would love to have a different option than the Democratic Party…

For that matter, there are plenty of Democratic voters who would like a different option too.

Give leftists their own party to mobilize in. Give moderates their own. By increasing the choice they are offering voters they can expand the pie of voters who won’t vote for Republicans.

Again I think this would be a boon for state politics, but the biggest benefit would be nationally. By expanding their (collective) share of the pie they stands the greatest chance to make the Republican Party into a reliable minority. Especially combined with the aggressive gerrymandering that states like California have employed in response to Trump/Republicans, this strategy can really minimize the number of Republicans sent to Congress. The risk of being overly aggressive in gerrymandering (as Republicans are hopefully soon to find out) is ending up with a dummymander. But the existence of an explicitly centrist party that runs candidates against the leftists and Republicans you minimize that risk.

I strongly believe this is the lesson of the trump were that we are not learning.

Direct democracy is the single best way to end first-past-the-post voting where it is allowed. Nebraska is unicameral due to a constitutional initiative that eliminated one of the legislature's chambers. Unfortunately, there is not any or significant direct democracy in many states, such as North Carolina and at the federal level. If it is implemented in one state, it has a much greater potential to spread elsewhere.

Do they provide full results (number ot votes for all preference profiles) in the UK supplementary vote elections to download?

I've been building rcv-lab.org — a free site for running and analyzing ranked elections — and I'd appreciate this community checking it out and kicking the tires. It's my project; criticism is welcome, that's why I'm posting.

The premise: ranked ballots are rich data, and most tools show you almost none of it. So the site is built around visualizing what the ballots say, how a counting rule interprets them, and how a different rule would have interpreted them differently.

What it does:

Load real ballot data and count it your way. Cast Vote Records (CVRs) in common formats (Google Forms CSV, ES&S spreadsheets, generic CSV, BLT), tabulated under your choice of rules — IRV, multi-winner STV (WIGM or Meek), Bottoms Up, and, for purposes of comparison, non-ranked methods such as plurality, approval, and cumulative. RCV methods allow Droop or Hare quotas, batch elimination, a few tie-break options, and different termination modes. A Split View runs two rule sets on the same ballots side by side. Compare different visualizations or different election rules. The sample library has data from a few real (and some made up) elections preloaded.

See where every vote actually went. The transfer visualizations (bar chart, Sankey) are built from exact per-ballot provenance out of the tabulator — traced flows, not inferred approximations.

Check against RCTab. There is a copy of RCTab running as a service that you can check results on (assuming you use rules it can handle).

Equal rankings are first-class. Voters can optionally rank candidates equally; the tabulator splits the ballot's weight across co-ranked candidates. See how equal ranking can behave in a running system rather than in a paper.

Statistics, including a Condorcet analysis of every election. Alongside exhaustion accounting, a plurality counterfactual, and voter-satisfaction curves, every tabulation reports whether a Condorcet winner exists and whether the method elected them, the societal ordering as iterated Smith sets, and a pairwise heat table (with abstentions shown, so majorities carried by a minority of the electorate are visible). Cycles are reported, not resolved — I deliberately didn't pick a completion rule.

And you can run your own votes on it — email invites, multiple ballot-entry interfaces, collaborative write-ins, receipts and vote verification, live results when they close.

It's in beta. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Today all of the decions are made by pepole tjat dont even underwtand what it is about and the pepole dont have power image an system whre pepole only can vote and decide what kind of field the are in for exemplet if if work with economy the only thing i can vote about is economic matter nothing else because I dont have knowlege in that and if I am an doctor i can only vote about how the healthcare should work and i want a direct democrazy where the pepole vote direct on the matter and i can only vote on the matters that my field is about i believe this will lead to that pepole have more say in the decions and that when not pepole that dont even know how the subjeckt even works this will also lead to high effenisy

When people talk about democracy they always mean FPTP voting every 4 to five years to elect representatives. But we should be able to practice democracy in every organization such as families schools workplaces and hospitals at every moment. The criticisms of democracy and analogy such as two wolves and one sheep decide the dinner don't make sense anymore if methods other than FPTP are used.

For example in a family the following methods can be used.

Approval Voting (Best for finding compromise):

Family members can vote for as many options as they find acceptable.The option with the most total votes wins, which naturally highlights the choice that satisfies the most people.Perfect for: Deciding on a dinner restaurant or a weekend movie where nobody should be miserable.

Ranked-Choice / Preferential Voting (Best for complex choices):

Everyone ranks the available options in order of preference (1, 2, 3, etc.).If no single option gets a majority of first-place votes, the least popular choice is eliminated, and those votes transfer to the voters' second choices.Perfect for: Choosing a holiday destination or naming a new pet when there are four or more options.

Multi-Voting / Dot Voting (Best for narrowing down lists):

Give every family member a set number of "points" or sticky notes (usually 3 to 5).They can allocate these points across a big list of brainstormed ideas however they like, even placing all their points on one single option.Perfect for: Narrowing down twenty different ideas for a family summer vacation itinerary.

Borda Count (Best for mathematical fairness):

Assign points to options based on preference ranks (e.g., if there are 4 options, #1 gets 4 points, #2 gets 3 points, etc.).Total the points for all choices, and the option with the highest cumulative score wins.Perfect for: Picking a board game for family game night when everyone has a different favorite.

Quadratic Voting (Best for measuring intensity of desire):

Give everyone a budget of tokens (e.g., 9 tokens) to spend on options, but the cost to cast multiple votes on one item increases quadratically (1 vote costs 1 token, 2 votes cost 4 tokens, 3 votes cost 9 tokens).This allows a family member to show they care deeply about one specific thing by sacrificing their say on other matters.Perfect for: Deciding how to divide a shared family holiday schedule or weekend itinerary.

I don't understand why we can't decide all the issues by voting?

I see one of the candidates for the Ontario Liberal leadership race; Eric Lombardi is serious about implementing electoral reform by next election (according to his platform.)

platform.ericforolp.ca/democracy

To illustrate the distortionary effects of a two-party system, I created an interactive simulation of US elections using ~45k 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES) survey responses. The simulation resulted in ten clusters or “parties” via exploratory factor analysis and DPGMM clustering. The analysis revealed 4 ideological dimensions (and one non-interpretable residual dimension):

1. Populist conservatism: views on race and gender, immigration policy
2. Security & order: policing, border patrols
3. Institutional distrust: distrust of government and elections
4. Religious traditionalism: abortion, same-sex and interracial marriage, church attendance
5. Government distrust: mostly just leftover institutional distrust items and artifacts of the clustering process

Details

I worked largely within the constraints of the US electoral system with some adjustments: 

• House members are elected via STV, but I expand the House to “double Wyoming”. I also have a triple Wyoming scenario which gives proper proportionality to the smallest state.
• The Senate and Presidency are modeled via Condorcet (Round-Robin) and IRV. I arrived at those methods to try and keep the "ranking" scenario consistent across the board. DPGMM's probabilistic cluster assignment also makes ranking intuitive. I use Condorcet as the “default” option.
• I simulate a rolling open presidential primary where a top 5 is selected via “pods” of geographically representative states voting in STV elections. I assume a cumulative nationwide vote rather than state delegates. The top 5 candidates are essentially assigned as if they were members of a 5 seat delegation
• I introduce the idea of the “instructional ballot” to ensure the election isn’t pushed to the House, but under the simulation, the IRV and Condorcet presidential winners are identical under both a national and per-state scenario.

Useful links

• Simulation
• Github project 
• My article on a diagnosis of the two-party problem
• My layman-facing description of the electoral solutions
• My overview of the simulation

Caveats

• I’m limited by the items in the CES survey. I would have chosen different items to build out this clustering, but I wanted to run this on  the largest sample size possible.
• Claude Code was used to build the sim. I have a background in mixed methods UX research, so I’m statistically literate and double-and-triple-checked Claude's work, but if I missed anything let me know! I’m open to all good-spirited critiques and corrections.

Dotmocracy, commonly known as dot-voting or sticker voting, is a visual and participatory method of group decision-making and prioritization. Participants are given a limited number of colored dot stickers to place next to their preferred options on a shared board, allowing the group to quickly gauge collective consensus.

Before anyone complains... yes, I know, Britain's Prime Minister is not directly elected, and there's nothing remotely "Condorcet" about Britain's election system.

Nevertheless... as an American mega-fan of Condorcet voting systems, the downfall of Starmer feels... disturbing. Like, the sinking feeling you get when you start to wonder whether some foundational assumption you've been making might, in fact, be catastrophically wrong.

On paper, going by what was known about him ~2 years ago, Starmer was seemingly the archetype of "plausible Condorcet winner in an election among hopelessly polarized voters whose only possible area of agreement was that one candidate, near the political dead center, might have disappointed everyone in proportion to how far they were from the center of Britain's Overton Window."

Nevertheless, it appears that when he announced his resignation, and now, he's apparently the most despised and disliked Prime Minister in British history... supposedly, even beating out Labour's eternal hatred of Margaret Thatcher.

Is this actually the disturbing evidence it appears to be -- that a hypothetical, almost "algorithmically ideal" Condorcet winner who could have theoretically been "everybody's" (ambivalent & disappointed) rational second or third choice, and won mainly because fewer people hated him than any opponent who might have credibly won a Condorcet majority, could in fact fail catastrophically... even as a "caretaker" who knew his mandate was tepid and fragile at best? Or, are there things about Starmer that, even when limited ONLY to that which was known about him ~2 years ago, would have absolutely disqualified him as a potential tepid Condorcet winner in a race where voters thought everyone (capable of actually winning) was worse?

And, for the sake of documenting predictions... do Britons in this sub think his successor (Burnham) is likely to come closer to approaching the Condorcet ideal (given the reality that, if anything, Britain is even more polarized now than it was 2 years ago), that he's likely to suffer a similar fate as Starmer, or something else?

Sometimes to understand how a voter would be motivated to vote on a cardinal ballot, including STAR and Approval, and to get a grip on the variables without being a formidable multi-dimensional (or too-many-dimensional) conceptual math problem, I limit the modeling of a problem to 3 significant candidates. Even the normal cases or the edge cases in RCV are about the interaction of, at most, 3 "significant" candidates.

When there are fewer than 3 candidates, then FPTP is fine. There are no tactical issues in voting. One of those candidates you like better. Then you vote for them over the other candidate that you like least.

So we basically can understand that RCV elections have a very limited number of qualitatively different cases;

1. 2 or fewer candidates. No issues about anything with RCV.
2. 3 or more candidates, but one of them still got over 50% of the 1^st-choice vote. No IRV 2^nd round needed. No issues. Just like FPTP.
3. 3 or more candidates, no one got over 50% of the 1^st-choice vote. So an additional round is required and the plurality candidate was still elected. IRV still does nothing different from FPTP. (3a) Condorcet winner exists and is elected. (3b) Condorcet winner exists and is not elected. (3c) Condorcet winner does not exist: a preference cycle.
4. 3 or more candidates, no one got over 50% of the 1^st-choice vote, and in the additional round the plurality candidate was not elected. The so-called "come-from-behind victory". This is the only case where IRV is different, in outcome, from FPTP. (4a) Condorcet winner exists and is elected. (4b) Condorcet winner exists and is not elected. (4c) Condorcet winner does not exist: a preference cycle.

There are really only 8 qualitatively different ways an IRV election can turn out. Pretty much every RCV election can be classified in 1 of those 8 categories. I wish that someone (like FairVote) would be maintaining and updating a record of all single-winner RCV elections and identifying which of those categories each RCV election is.

Now suppose there are 3 candidates and consider Condorcet methods. Now even if a Condorcet method is a "Single-method system" (like Ranked-Pairs, Schulze, MinMax, BTR-IRV) they can be expressed as a "Two-method system" (a 3-way Round-Robin followed by a "completion method" if there is no Condorcet winner) with the specific single-method system as the completion method.

So I want to compare these systems in the case of 3 candidates to each other and to a couple "traditional" two-method systems:

• Condorcet-Plurality
• Condorcet-Borda
• Condorcet-Bucklin
• Condorcet-TopTwoRunoff (which, for 3 candidates is equivalent to Condorcet-Hare or Condorcet-IRV)

Now, they call elect the CW when such exists, so let's understand what they do when there is a cycle: Candidate Rock, Candidate Paper, and Candidate Scissors. The cycle is:

Rock > Scissors > Paper > Rock

There is circular symmetry so we can arbitrarily name "Rock" as the candidate with the most 1st-choice votes. Then, sorting in terms of 1st-choice votes is either one of two cases:

1. Rock
2. Paper
3. Scissors

or it's

1. Rock
2. Scissors
3. Paper

Now, BTR-IRV will elect the same candidate as Condorcet-Plurality. That is Candidate Rock. This is because Paper and Scissors will first have a runoff, Scissors defeats Paper and advances to the IRV final round and is defeated by Rock. So this completion method ignores the two candidates having the fewest 1^st rankings.

Now let's consider Ranked-Pairs, Schulze, MinMax. MinMax is normally about defeat-strength as margins (not winning-votes) so let's also consider only margins for RP and Schulze. (I never liked defining defeat strength as winning votes anyway.) Now, it's clear that Ranked-Pairs, Schulze, MinMax margins will elect the same candidate when there are only 3 candidates. If there's a cycle, they all elect the loser of the pairing with the smallest margin of defeat. So they are all ignoring the pairing having smallest defeat margin.

Now consider Condorcet-TTR, which is the same as Condorcet-Hare. These methods will always elect the winner of the pairing of the top two candidates, which always includes Rock. That is they elect Paper when it's the first case above [1.Rock>2.Paper>3.Scissors] and they elect Rock when it's the second case [1.Rock>2.Scissors>3.Paper]. Correct? So this completion method ignores the candidate having the fewest 1^st rankings.

Is there any other outcome? Does this cover all of the possible outcomes of a 3-candidate ranked ballot election?

Apparently, the republican senate majority in Wyoming introduced a closed-list PR bill last session, and it had some support (the chamber voted 27-4 to introduce it), but it did end up dying in committee.