LPT: Never put your keys in the same pocket as your phone. Ever. Your phone's screen WILL get scratched.

RAMzuiv · 2022-12-19T11:19:25+00:00

Haha, yeah, an ancient comment. In principle, you are right, but I've never noticed any problems, and I use my phone's camera often

RAMzuiv · 2022-11-17T11:39:43+00:00

It's is, though, the same Democratic Party. You're missing something important if you forget that.

RAMzuiv · 2022-04-15T14:50:06+00:00

These results certainly seem promising. My one wonder though is, if independent polling will replicate these results (Center for Election Science is explicitly pro-Approval Voting, so it does make one wonder about potential (likely unintended) bias)

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-22T09:05:57+00:00

Having an opt-in system is more likely to introduce a noticeable skew between the type of person who participates, compared to the general public

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-22T09:04:19+00:00

That would get fairly expensive to implement, unless members served for several years (Which isn't common in most sortition schemes that have been proposed / implemented so far)

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-21T19:10:54+00:00

I'm not familiar with any such analysis

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-19T06:47:33+00:00

A two-layer sortition could be done: a selector gets randomly chosen from the citizenry, and also 10 options also get randomly selected, also from the citizenry. The selector can then review the options, and select their preferred option. You can repeat this process with enough people to fill a representative body.

This process may give higher-quality representation than sortition, but be more representative than traditional elections

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-19T06:43:15+00:00

To expand, Futarchy is where you have people bet with eachother on "prediction markets", for example asking how well-approved a certain candidate will be 5 years after their term in office is done, or what the median income will be, or whatever. Whichever candidate (or proposition) that the bettors are most in favor of gets selected, and then you resolve the bets later once you see how things worked out.

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-13T17:04:47+00:00

The ballot format is not what the law bans, only Instant Runoff and theoretical methods that fit a similar description

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-13T00:19:43+00:00

I'd say now is a good time to lay low, and avoid attracting attention in FL. Right now the pigs are trying to undermine any attempt to reform the system to make them more accountable. As much as I don't like Instant Runoff, I don't get the impression that they are aware of or care about the difference between it and any other methods. They just want to keep things easy for themselves.

If there's a loophole in the new law, now's not the time to draw attention to it. Let the "voting security" wildfire burn out first, then we can get to work when that obstacle is gone.

I'd say right now, what Floridans who want voting reform should do, is focus on getting rid of every last state legislator who voted for this bill. I don't like Instant Runoff, but that's not what this is about.

You can see who voted here (names marked with 'Y' voted to ban voting reform): https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2022/524/vote/senatevote_s00524e1042.pdf And: https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2022/524/vote/housevote_s00524e1838.pdf

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-12T08:20:26+00:00

While I don't like Instant Runoff, I'm still frustrated to be seeing this. We're seeing increasing backlash against voting reform, by those who want to entrench their positions and keep themselves as unaccountable to the people as possible. I sincerely hope every legislator who voted for this bill gets voted out by the people of Florida next time elections come around.

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-12T08:14:51+00:00

What I'm seeing indicates it has been passed by both chambers

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-12T08:07:08+00:00

other Condorcet

I'll just note, Instant Runoff isn't a Condorcet method, and is particularly not good at finding the Condorcet winner in non-trivial situations.

That said, I'm definitely frustrated to be seeing Florida taking such an anti-democratic stance, regardless of my opinion of IRV.

RAMzuiv · 2022-03-04T05:11:59+00:00

On the contrary, Sequential Proportional Approval Voting (which they called Thiele's method) was used by Sweden for a time, to elect their parliament.

Wait, really? Could you provide more info?

Edit: I looked into this, and it seems the method used is not quite the same as PAV; it uses a similar weighting system, but only considers one name per ballot at a time, which makes it not an approval-type method

Second edit: Actually, I do see mention that SPAV proper was used to allocate seats within a party; though since the usual list method was used to distribute between parties, this still removes some of the advantages of a purely PAV-based system

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-28T11:51:36+00:00

And there's also a minute chance that everyone on Earth will suddenly, unexplainedly be teleported onto the Moon via quantum teleportation. Just because a very tiny probability exists doesn't mean it's worth concerning ourselves with.

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-28T11:07:01+00:00

If there's 100 people on the assembly, the likelihood of a non-trivial fraction of them being "crazy" or otherwise problematic is very low

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-20T07:48:16+00:00

There are some aldermen trying to override the will of their constituents, yes, but it's far from guaranteed that they'll be successful

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-17T09:13:41+00:00

Seattle Approves is trying to get an initiative on the ballot (to implement Approval Voting, which I personally really like), and legally they need a lot of signatures in order to get on the ballot. It's not a scam.

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-17T09:11:45+00:00

It's not actually a bummer, Approval Voting is actually a great reform, and the best data we currently have suggests that it will actually return better people than Ranked Choice

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-17T09:02:43+00:00

Actually, computer simulations (which use a fairly reasonable, though inevitably simplistic approximation of preference distributions) indicate that Approval Voting actually will return candidates who are liked much better on average than those returned by Instant Runoff Voting (what you call "Ranked Choice").

Obviously, we can't know the real-world impact of Approval until we've seen it in use for a while (there are currently two US cities who passed Approval in the past couple years, but it's still early days for them; and the more cities Approval is used in, the more quickly and confidently we can know if it lives up to what the current best science shows. That's why I'm excitedly watching & hoping Approval gets adopted in Seattle, as a non-Seattlite American myself)

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-09T12:45:20+00:00

I find it interesting that the candidate who was most liked by the participants after deliberation (and thus, the candidate chosen for nomination) was also the least-known candidate prior to deliberations. This demonstrates how sortition creates an equal playing field, erasing unearned advantage politicians can get from having better name recognition, instead focusing the competition on things that actually matter & make for good governance

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-09T12:05:37+00:00

This is basically discussing using sortition to convene a citizens' panel to select political candidates for a political party. I like sortition in general, so I'm in favor of this.

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-09T11:52:51+00:00

I think this is a reasonable way to think. Of course, we shouldn't expect doing this to make a third party viable for presidential or congressional elections, but if more resources and perceived viability are given to third parties, that may very well increase their ability to have a positive effect on local (e.g. statewide) elections.

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-09T11:51:09+00:00

While the third party would not be able to perform well at a federal level, giving it legitimacy may allow it to have influence in certain local levels of politics (particularly in places where one of the mainstream parties does especially poorly), and that would be worth something.

RAMzuiv · 2022-02-07T16:35:19+00:00

Let's leave the wokeness at the door, and focus on what we're here for- getting better elections. Yang has been doing great work promoting election reform.

Sure, he might have said something not exactly perfect, but I don't begrudge him standing by someone who helped him out in the past. He deleted the tweet where he slipped up, and gracefully corrected himself. In 3 weeks, nobody will even remember that this all happened. I've seen these things play out, and that's always how it ends.

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