19 votes

Topic deleted by author

9 comments

  1. [3]
    Gaywallet
    Link
    I think this is a fantastic way to vote, but it's application for the kind of voting people typically get very polarized about is less obvious. You couldn't apply this across a single plane such...

    I think this is a fantastic way to vote, but it's application for the kind of voting people typically get very polarized about is less obvious. You couldn't apply this across a single plane such as voting just for president because the pool of candidates is too small and it's unlikely that people would vote for more than 1 candidate.

    If, however, you were to spread this more widely across voting for federal office in general - so that if you wanted to spend 10 votes on the president you could, but then you could not vote for a senator, house representative, or other offices, then I think it could be quite useful. However, I can also see people making the argument that they were excluded from their right to vote for every office by a system like this (if they cast all 10 votes for president and therefore cannot cast any for their senator, for example).

    I think it's tricky to implement at a level outside of the large, multi-choice issues. This may be a great solution to the process of law making, but is unlikely to be a good replacement for ranked choice voting or other methods which work well for single choice issues.

    5 votes
    1. The_Fad
      Link Parent
      That's a pretty weak argument, though. No one would have forced them to cast all 10 of their hypothetical votes for one candidate, and they presumably will have been informed the specifics of how...

      I can also see people making the argument that they were excluded from their right to vote for every office by a system like this

      That's a pretty weak argument, though. No one would have forced them to cast all 10 of their hypothetical votes for one candidate, and they presumably will have been informed the specifics of how the process works before hand. Saying they were excluded from voting in any way is less a complaint about the system, I'd think, and more a complaint about the political climate that "forced" them to cast all 10 votes for one candidate.

      3 votes
    2. Arshan
      Link Parent
      I am basing this on the US system, but I would say it could work well in a presidential race. It couldn't work in the current system because the current system is shit. The electoral college and...

      I am basing this on the US system, but I would say it could work well in a presidential race. It couldn't work in the current system because the current system is shit. The electoral college and county's as the atomic unit mean that votes are not equal; if you are in the 49%, you had no effect on the election and are not being represented. Historically, it was argued that even though your candidate lost, they would still include you in their analysis and decisions. I don't believe this has ever been true, but Trump has definitely made that doubt concrete. Without either of those problems and quadratic voting, I think it is probable that many more candidates would run and the two party cage would probably be broken.

      3 votes
  2. [2]
    alyaza
    Link
    so essentially, it's ranked-choice voting but with an additional dimension which allows you to weigh, to a certain extent, the impact of your voting preference. this seems nice, but i don't really...

    so essentially, it's ranked-choice voting but with an additional dimension which allows you to weigh, to a certain extent, the impact of your voting preference. this seems nice, but i don't really see the use case for it outside of contexts where RCV would already probably be the best option, and it seems like there'd be an upper limit on how large of a group you'd be able to use it with before the arithmetic and getting people to use it just becomes too complicated to be efficient. (also, basically punishing people for actually standing for something does seem a bit weird as a system in general, even if it does mitigate people who act only in their own interests?)

    3 votes
    1. Gaywallet
      Link Parent
      I think it's best applied to situations where there are many choices. Using it to vote on a variety of bills is a great way to surface things that are widely popular but might fall along party...

      I think it's best applied to situations where there are many choices. Using it to vote on a variety of bills is a great way to surface things that are widely popular but might fall along party lines. I can see a republican catching flack for voting directly yes on a gay rights bill, but I don't see the same happening if they cast 1 of 100 votes on it, and distribute 2-3 votes per "important" issue.

      I think for it to work at a national level, you'd have to have a pool of votes for every office, in order to allow people's preference for certain people in certain positions (such as if they care more about a senator than president) to emerge.

      5 votes
  3. [4]
    Micycle_the_Bichael
    Link
    I haven't read any of the supporting material because I'm at work, but from that summary, I think this is an awful idea. (1) How does this work where there isn't electronic voting? In Colorado...

    I haven't read any of the supporting material because I'm at work, but from that summary, I think this is an awful idea.

    (1) How does this work where there isn't electronic voting? In Colorado they got special voting interfaces for this. We can't get voting machines that don't have known vulnerabilities out of use. Yet we're supposed to believe this system will get deployed everywhere?

    (1a) Do they all come from one company? That's concerning given how poor security is for voting machines.

    (1b) If this system requires electronic voting, that sounds like it is going to eliminate absentee voting and vote-by-mail. So you're increasing the number of barriers for people to vote by once again requiring them to stand in line to vote.

    (1c) Let's assume you don't require electronic voting and keep paper ballot. What is the plan for keeping track of how many votes you have left? Assume people can do math? That's concerning. What happens if people do math wrong? Does their vote not get counted? When you turn in your ballot do you have to stand there and wait for someone to manually make sure you didn't go over your vote total? That sounds like a bottleneck that will make the voting process take longer, disenfranchising voters (seeing how in Georgia we already saw how forcing people into overcrowded voting locations causes people not to vote). What happens if the vote-counter also makes a mistake?

    (2) Good luck explaining how quadratic voting works on a ballot. One of the struggles for RCV is that it is hard for voters to understand, especially people who aren't native English speakers. Throwing math at people who already barely understand the language? That's sure not going to go well.

    (3) Do the 100 votes stay constant? Do people with longer ballots have to spread their votes thinner than people with shorter ballots? That sounds like the reason people don't like the electoral college: it gives an incentive to have a shorter ballot so people can put more votes towards specific things (ex: one county has 10 things to vote on, one county has 20. The county with 10 things can by default put more votes into things because they don't have to care about as many issues). If the number varies based on the length of the ballot you've introduced ANOTHER moving part voters have to keep track of.

    I don't know. This is just what I came up with while reading the summary. I liked ranked choice voting but I think this goes in the exact opposite direction voting should be going. This makes voting harder and more complicated and has a lot of logistical problems that could be solved but realistically won't be. I'm meh on this idea in theory and think it would be disastrous in practice.

    3 votes
    1. [2]
      Archimedes
      Link Parent
      Another potential issue is that you can very easily run into the knapsack problem if you have lots of tokens available on relatively few choices. That is, you could have spent, say, 87/100 tokens...

      Another potential issue is that you can very easily run into the knapsack problem if you have lots of tokens available on relatively few choices. That is, you could have spent, say, 87/100 tokens but you don't have enough to gain another vote for something you want due to the quadratic cost and you don't want to spend it on other options you oppose. Do you shuffle tokens around try to solve an NP-hard optimization problem to get closer to being able to use all that you've been allocated?

      I guess you could allow partial votes to people don't have to worry about wasting tokens, but most people aren't going to be able to asses a continuously changing marginal value of a token with any kind of ease.

      Hmm... I've got to 4 votes by spending 16 tokens, so the value of my 17th token is, what, sqrt(17) - sqrt(16)? I can't do that in my head or even with pencil and paper, but it should be close to the slope of the tangent line of sqrt(x) at x = 4. The derivative of sqrt(x) is 1/(2sqrt(x)), so the value of the 17th token is about 1/8th = 0.125, but that's overestimating a bit since the slope is decreasing. Or I could simply interpolate between (16,4) and (25,5) for a slope of 1/9 = 0.111 but that's underestimating.

      Even knowing how many tokens you need to get to another whole vote requires mental subtraction beyond many voters level of comfort.

      3 votes
      1. Micycle_the_Bichael
        Link Parent
        Another great point I didn't even think about! I'm a cs/math double major so I'm a bit ashamed my brain didn't connect this to the knapsack problem immediately XD just kidding. Its a really good...

        Another great point I didn't even think about! I'm a cs/math double major so I'm a bit ashamed my brain didn't connect this to the knapsack problem immediately XD just kidding. Its a really good point. What happens with spare tokens? You can't have them roll over across elections, that would be a fucking nightmare. My brain is fried trying to come up with solutions that would be easy enough to implement and that average user could use and understand. Like can you imagine trying to explain partial votes and how they would be weighted/work? Not just how to calculate the value, but just explaining what the marginal value means. I can't imagine most people would understand it.

        2 votes
    2. alyaza
      Link Parent
      given the calculations involved, i'm going to guess that this would remain very much a digital process. can you imagine trying to hand calculate the fucking arithmetic for this? that would be a...

      (1c) Let's assume you don't require electronic voting and keep paper ballot. What is the plan for keeping track of how many votes you have left? Assume people can do math? That's concerning. What happens if people do math wrong? Does their vote not get counted? When you turn in your ballot do you have to stand there and wait for someone to manually make sure you didn't go over your vote total? That sounds like a bottleneck that will make the voting process take longer, disenfranchising voters (seeing how in Georgia we already saw how forcing people into overcrowded voting locations causes people not to vote). What happens if the vote-counter also makes a mistake?

      given the calculations involved, i'm going to guess that this would remain very much a digital process. can you imagine trying to hand calculate the fucking arithmetic for this? that would be a fucking mess and a half.

      (3) Do the 100 votes stay constant? Do people with longer ballots have to spread their votes thinner than people with shorter ballots? That sounds like the reason people don't like the electoral college: it gives an incentive to have a shorter ballot so people can put more votes towards specific things (ex: one county has 10 things to vote on, one county has 20. The county with 10 things can by default put more votes into things because they don't have to care about as many issues). If the number varies based on the length of the ballot you've introduced ANOTHER moving part voters have to keep track of.

      i imagine that this would never be introduced in a large-scale election for this reason alone. structurally speaking, it's probably not possible to use under the current system because of how balkanized american elections are and how conducting them and the positions that are elected is mostly a state and local government thing. you would likely need a centralized, government-run electoral tradition for this to really work as an actual voting system outside of contexts like the way it was used in the article (to determine the priority of legislation that democrats in colorado wanted to pass during this session)

      2 votes