essays-ccs/RR/vote_proposal.md

I have a proposal having to do with changing the way national holds votes.

1. Switch away from the representative(grouped), branch-based voting that we do now, to individual, low-level voting (direct democracy).
   • Wait for a minimum quorum of all members(1/2 or 2/3rds of all members)
   • Wait for an expiration time (1 week or 2 weeks, etc)
2. Switch to range or approval voting.
   • We could either create a private facebook group(or use the one we already have) for approval voting.
   • Or use this site for range voting called simplevote, I built for us to use(a sample poll)

1) Doing away with representative voting

Why representative(grouped) voting is bad

A candidate with fewer votes can win in a grouped voting election. Here's an example.

Election on which is the best color, yellow or blue?

• 15 voters are grouped into 3 groups, A, B, and C, and 3 seats can be won.

Ballots:

Voting group	Yellow	Blue
A	2	3
B	5	0
C	2	3

Election:

Candidate	Votes	%	Seats won	Seats won %	% Error	Single-winner seats won	Single-winner seats won %	% Error
Yellow	9	60%	1	33%	26%	0	0%	60%
Blue	6	40%	2	66%	26%	1	100%	60%
Sum					53%			120%

Blue wins, even though it got 3 less votes than yellow.

This is called the misrepresentation error, ~53% error in this election if we gave out 3 "seats", or 120% if its a single-winner.

misrepresentation error = sum(abs(percent_of_seats_won - percent_of_actual_votes))

Here's an example of the misrepresentation errors for the 2017 UK election.

Why was it used in the first place?

Representative voting was used because it made it easier to tally votes with a small number of representatives, especially when reps had to travel long distances to tally up a vote. So one state's rep could show up at a national convention, instead of every voter in the whole state. This isn't necessary nowadays, where we can place and tally up votes online.

2) Switching to range or approval voting

Option 1: Facebook

Just use our private national FB group to hold votes.

Option 2: Range voting with simplevote

What is range voting?

I've built a site that uses it called simplevote, it might just be easiest to see it in action for a poll I set up for us. We could easily use this for national, and I can tweak it for our needs.

• Range voting is olympic score voting, so each voter chooses between 0-10 on candidates, with 10 being yes / liking, 5 being neutral, and 0 being no / dislike.
• You don't have to vote for every option, not voting won't hurt your current votes.
• Range voting beats out approval (a subset of it), IRV, and First past the post for minimizing voter regret.
• Votes must pass with an average score greater than say, 5 or 6.

To calculate the winner(s), you take the average(s) for each candidate and rank them from highest average to lowest. I've coded different voting systems (STV, IRV), and they're much more difficult to calculate and explain, and less expressive in general. It also beats those even when voters are being dishonest, but for some reason they've found that voters are less likely to be dishonest when using range voting (probably because you have more choices).

You can learn more about range voting at rangevoting.org.

Additional issues

• How do we decide when a quorum(minimum # of voters) is reached? Maybe 1/2 of all members, 2/3rds, or 3/4ths, before it gets certified.
• How long do the elections last? (1-3 weeks seems like a good default)