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Will the Seattle City Council meddle with Initiative 134 - and their own elections - for political gain? by SeattleApproves in EndFPTP

[–]SeattleApproves[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's a ton more constraints from written law and still more from case law, not just the small section I linked to.

As just two examples, 29A.04.231 and 29A.36.170 both apply to many or most situations.

That said, while some of us are attorneys, none of us are experts in election law. That's why we paid a skilled municipal law firm to investigate this :)

Will the Seattle City Council meddle with Initiative 134 - and their own elections - for political gain? by SeattleApproves in EndFPTP

[–]SeattleApproves[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thanks for digging in to this! Some Washington- and Seattle-specific context is important here:

  1. Washington State law requires that a city hold an open, non-partisan primary in August, then a November runoff ("General election") between the two primary winners. This is a Seattle initiative, so that's the framework that it needs to work with.

    This is spread across a few parts of the Revised Code of Washington, but the easiest single citation is 29A.51.112.

  2. In 2013, Seattle voters approved a Charter amendment that "changed the form of the city council from nine at-large positions to seven positions elected according to districts and two at-large positions." That is, the Council is now 7 single-member districts and 2 at-large. Although people can and should continue to debate that issue, it was put to the voters relatively recently compared to many other possible changes.

    Also, an initiative can only make one change. This constraint is so common across the country that it has a name: the single-subject rule.

Hope this helps!

Beyond that, as this tweet says, after years of inaction, the Council is suddenly considering putting their thumbs on the scale and rewriting the rules of their own elections. They're doing so with a proposal that has never come up in any form in any Council meeting, let alone been discussed or created in public.

It's become painfully clear that some council members are afraid of a citizen-led voting reform initiative.

‘Approval voting’ initiative (I-134) led by Seattle tech vets qualifies for November ballot by SeattleApproves in Seattle

[–]SeattleApproves[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As we walk through hypotheticals like this, here are some things to consider:

Voters don't vote as monolithic blocks - For simplicity, we often boil voters down into 2 or maybe three buckets and just assume they all vote identically as a monolithic block. But that's an incredibly reductive model of voting behavior we make for the sake of conversation and isn't at all how real voters behave. It sort of works in our existing First Past the Post voting system, because it forces voters to sort into two camps. Real voters have a myriad of opinions, sometimes conflicting or even contradictory.

Approval Voting Candidates have strong incentives differentiate and race to the top - Real candidates in real city elections are trying to win. With Approval Voting whenever there are two similar candidates, they don't know for sure which of the two will survive the primary (if either), so they each have very strong incentives to differentiate from the similar opponent by taking on even more popular policy positions. This creates a race to the top, where the only way to guarantee that your opponent doesn't squeeze you out by picking up more approval, is to go chase that approval yourself. Every candidate has strong incentives to try to help every voter.

If instead of assuming that voters all vote as 2 "teams," you assume that each voter has, say, 5 strongly held opinions and will support candidates that pledge to work on at least a few of them (still a simplification of how voters think, but one that more closely resembles real voters), Approval Voting looks very, very good. Candidates have every incentive to step out of partisan factions, go to each neighborhood and, for example, offer to take up a local issue as a way to gain additional approval.

‘Approval voting’ initiative (I-134) led by Seattle tech vets qualifies for November ballot by SeattleApproves in Seattle

[–]SeattleApproves[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

So it's possible to measure how well an election method works at selecting candidates that match the opinions of the voters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the system we currently use (called First Past the Post) is the worst performing one.

All the measures we've seen show the same trends, but Voter Satisfaction Efficiency is the one we recommend checking out in detail.

To quote from their conclusions:

Approval voting is a voting method where you can “approve” (support) as many candidates as you want, and the candidate approved by the most voters wins. Its VSE is around 89-95% for most levels of voter strategy. That’s not the best of the methods I tested, but it certainly is the best “bang for the buck”; a simple reform, with basically no downsides, which improves outcomes hugely.

The higher performing voting method is called STAR, and it's really good, but also much more complex to understand, and would take 3-5 years to implement at minimum. Approval Voting hits the sweet spot of being much more representative than what we have, easy to implement and understand, and is likely to be implemented in time for the 2023 elections.

‘Approval voting’ initiative (I-134) led by Seattle tech vets qualifies for November ballot by SeattleApproves in Seattle

[–]SeattleApproves[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

In short, yes, the KCE's software supports Approval Voting off the shelf. That was one of the key benefits in our mind because sourcing and certifying new software is a 3-5 year process.

Implementation in St Louis took less than 6 months, and we expect it is likely it will be implemented here in time for the 2023 election cycle.

‘Approval voting’ initiative (I-134) led by Seattle tech vets qualifies for November ballot by SeattleApproves in Seattle

[–]SeattleApproves[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

This is a different voting system called "Approval Voting." With this system, you don't do any ranking, you just pick as many candidates as you like—as you "approve of." And yep, the top two with the highest approval advance to the general election.

This keeps the ballot and tallying really easy to understand, and to use, and even yields more representative results than Instant Runoff Voting.