Theoretical Representative system: multi-seat districts with vote-proportional power

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I have been mulling a representative system for a sci-fi (quasi-Utopian) setting that, as far as I know, is not in place anywhere in the real world. I am, however, little more than a voting systems enthusiast (and maybe not even that), so if anyone has insights into how this system might produce less-than-ideal scenarios or other instabilities (and ways to improve it), I'd like to hear about it.

The system is as follows:

The political entity ("country") is divided into representative districts. Each district can elect up to X candidates (say, 3). Each candidate then goes on to the representative camera ("parliament"), where they vote on laws and engage in other political processes as representatives of the population at large.

The trick is that each representative doesn't get one single vote, but one vote per person that voted for them.

Example: district 1, with 1 million people, votes Alice, Bob and Charlie to parliament. Alice gets 250k votes, Bob gets 150k votes, Charlie gets 20k votes. In parliament, Alice will wield considerable more voting power than her two colleagues, as reflection of the fact a significant portion of her district chose her as representative.

District 2 (same pop) votes Danae, Eddy and Ferdinand, each with 300k votes. These representatives are more equal between them, but thanks to the greater participation of individuals of their district, they will yield more individual, not to mention combined, power than district 1, due to the increased participation.

Voting is absolute and universal. Everyone that has lived in the country since the previous election can vote, including children (up to an age of understanding, their votes are casted by their primary guardian; after that they can cast votes themselves, although it is accepted that the youngest are strongly influenced by their parents, and said influence expected to dwindle as they become adults [insert joke here about adolescent rebellion])

Issues I see:
"Wasted" votes: what happens to the votes of candidates not selected? If the results for a district were 105k-104k-103k-102k-101k-100k, that means leaving 303k people unrepresented, practically half of all voters.

Connected to the above is the number of representatives per district. Here I am using three because that is what it usually exemplified as. But no matter how many I plug in, it is trivial to design a result where more than that run, and a significant portion of the vote went to non-elected candidates. This is a resource issue - both from paying for their service and from "getting anything done" there is a hard cap on how many politicians should form the executive branch.

I'd love to hear possibilities for minimizing the vote waste. Maybe a second round, where only those candidates can be voted for, to give the rest of the population a chance to re-appoint? Could that have unintended consequences?

There is also an issue of the districting itself. Based on population is obvious, but would lead to having to redraw maps all the time, which annoys people near borders that are shifted back and forth. Instead, I envision that the number of representatives is fixed, and district population determines how many they each get to pick. This is the part I've thought of the least, so any alternatives are welcome (although do please keep in mind there has to be a hard cap on how many the state can support)

Note: given the restriction on discussing politics, please don't refer to real life systems. Lets keep it theoretical and, if applicable, to fictional systems in other works (sci-fi or otherwise).

Thanks,

Grey Wolf

[Knaight]

Voting is absolute and universal. Everyone that has lived in the country since the previous election can vote, including children (up to an age of understanding, their votes are casted by their primary guardian; after that they can cast votes themselves, although it is accepted that the youngest are strongly influenced by their parents, and said influence expected to dwindle as they become adults [insert joke here about adolescent rebellion])

Having large families of children as a political strategy is already a real thing - and that's despite the assumption that adult children will unfailingly follow their parent's politics being somewhere between bad and hilarious. This outright encourages that, and while it probably won't have much of an effect on normal society it could easily lead to a flourishing of insular and hierarchical societies where the leadership demands this and people do it, along with those societies getting real power.

As for wasted votes, that's one of the things instant runoff voting can deal with pretty neatly - and IRV works for 3 end candidates just as well as for 1 end candidate. A second round of voting would also work, although IRV from the beginning instead of FPTP followed by a second vote would likely work better for a 3 candidate system.

[Jasdoif]

I'm going to assume you've accounted for the widespread "alteration" of votes at the local level this degree of granularity would incentivize, because I don't think that's what you want input on That, and mitigating the effectiveness at the independent-and-small scale could be accomplished by operating on 1k chunks of population or so.


High-level, this reminds me a lot of party-list proportional representation, except instead of a party and multiple candidates you have a candidate and multiple votes/"points". You have an interesting aspect, though, in that your arrangement allows the people to undercut a set of horribly unpopular candidates by withholding support from them.

To that end, my first recommendation would be approval voting: Then means an actual count of how many members of the population approve of each particular candidate, and can use that as a more direct measure of how much support each of the top X candidates have. Concerns over collusion between possible ideologically-identical candidates can be mitigated by capping the total "points" from the district at the number of votes placed that supported any of the winning candidates (kind of like satisfaction approval voting).

As for districting....Frankly, if you're tying a representative's influence to population voting for them in a district, that means districts (aside from their population) are almost arbitrary outside of how many candidates they can field, so defining them geographically seems fine. For distributing an unchanging/slow-changing number of representatives amongst a potentially changing population distribution, the Huntington-Hill method was created for exactly that purpose.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Having large families of children as a political strategy is already a real thing - and that's despite the assumption that adult children will unfailingly follow their parent's politics being somewhere between bad and hilarious. This outright encourages that

I didn't want to go into too much detail, because it somewhat external to the process, but the reason children get votes is indeed to promote population growth, since the birth rate of the country (the actual world, in fact) is under the replenishment rate. "Each child increases your voting power for about 10 years" is the pitch. There are further incentives beyond this, too.

and while it probably won't have much of an effect on normal society it could easily lead to a flourishing of insular and hierarchical societies where the leadership demands this and people do it, along with those societies getting real power.

I'm not sure I follow why you think this would be the case necessarily. I mean, with standard vote anonymity that shouldn't be much of a danger, would it? Any child in such a situation can swear they voted for Alice, but in fact voted for Bob, and the leadership cannot tell.

As for wasted votes, that's one of the things instant runoff voting can deal with pretty neatly - and IRV works for 3 end candidates just as well as for 1 end candidate. A second round of voting would also work, although IRV from the beginning instead of FPTP followed by a second vote would likely work better for a 3 candidate system.

My concern with IRV is that there is still the possibility that there will be disenfranchised voters who didn't pick any of the people who end up going to Parliament. The second round is meant to address that; that said, I suppose there is no reason to not do both: IRV for the first round, and a second round as final pick. I could call the first round "IRV primaries", and the second "Vote Transfer".

QUICK ETA:

I'm going to assume you've accounted for the widespread "alteration" of votes at the local level this degree of granularity would incentivize, because I don't think that's what you want input on That, and mitigating the effectiveness at the independent-and-small scale could be accomplished by operating on 1k chunks of population or so.

I honestly don't know what danger you are highlighting here. Mind expanding the point?

Second quick ETA: OK, so I've opened all your links in tabs, will have to take a bit to read through them. But do know that that was exactly what I was hoping to get from the thread, so thank you very much for them.

Thanks, in any case, for taking the time to answer.

Grey Wolf

[Jasdoif]

I honestly don't know what danger you are highlighting here. Mind expanding the point?

Since every individual vote directly affects the overall parliament...Anyone who gets access to the votes/tallying (legitimately or otherwise), and sees an advantage (societal, personal, professional, etc.) to weakening/strengthening candidates as they see fit, will have an opportunity to influence the overall parliament in a direction of their choosing. Most representative systems would need a bunch of coordination or high-in-the-chain access to achieve results like this, because of the low representative-to-population ratio; here, even something as low-level as modifying a handful of a neighbor's votes as they're counted would have a measurable (if small) impact, and there's a lot of someones who could act independently.

This might balance out if every candidate has similar appeal with the concept of fair play, but if one candidate draws a lot of the "cheat-to-win" mentality (by mindset or graft), they'll have a definite advantage.


Whether this is something that'll occur in your setting or not is, of course, something I can't answer; a "quasi-Utopian" society could be idealistic enough that this won't come up in a meaningful way, and/or you may be presenting a top-level view of the governmental concept rather than a holistic view of its implementation. I've found it's easy to forget the local aspect of a wide-spanning system, though, so I thought it was at least worth mentioning.

[JeenLeen]

For wasted votes, I agree that some preliminary voting system should work. Each district could have up to X candidates, but an initial voting brings that down to 3 (or however many you wind up deciding on in the end.) Those 3 are voted on in the election that determines which ones get the most power.

That actually seems a cool nuance, since it allows people to try to vote for unlikely-to-win candidates that they would hope win in the first election, then (if their candidate didn't win) vote for the one they like best out of the remaining options. That removes the fear of a vote being wasted by voting for an underdog.

To prevent wasted votes: you could make voting mandatory, that it, it is illegal not to vote. Allow things like medical exceptions, and perhaps give a voting window (a few days) or let it be done remotely. This is a sci-fi setting, so using their equivalent of internet should work. Basically, remove the deterrents that could exist to justify not voting because of it being a hassle.
Note that mandatory voting doesn't necessarily mean jail time for not voting. It could tie into tax exemptions/fees or some other incentive system. Depending on how the society looks at things, the social stigma of not voting could be enough. (Maybe who you vote for is private, but not whether you voted.) Though I'd prefer just some fees or losing a tax exemption for non-voters, especially if you are going for a utopia feel.

However, wasted votes don't seem a terrible thing in this system, since the # of votes is tied to the # of people who cared enough to vote for that person. It is bad if the non-voter rate is high, but if it's just a few percent then I would reckon it's not much of an issue. You'd need a culture that really emphasizes voting or some legal/financial constraints to get a realistic high voting-rate, though. Or at least that's what it would take for it to be realistic to me.
And if one 300k district only got 200k votes--well, that's what they get for being apathetic. Do better next year. (That could be the cultural viewpoint, at least.)

---
I really don't like the idea of how powerful this make some representatives over some others. It seems like it would lend easily to low-vote reps forming coalitions and alliances to counter-balance high-vote reps. Maybe that's fine. Your idea does sound 'fair' for the populace. And I admit I'm fairly ignorant about political science, so my emotional opinion means little.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Since every individual vote directly affects the overall parliament...Anyone who gets access to the votes/tallying (legitimately or otherwise), and sees an advantage (societal, personal, professional, etc.) to weakening/strengthening candidates as they see fit, will have an opportunity to influence the overall parliament in a direction of their choosing. Most representative systems would need a bunch of coordination or high-in-the-chain access to achieve results like this, because of the low representative-to-population ratio; here, even something as low-level as modifying a handful of a neighbor's votes as they're counted would have a measurable (if small) impact, and there's a lot of someones who could act independently.

Oh, OK, so you are suggesting that someone modify the actual results - so Alice's 250k votes are instead registered as, say, 255k. That is not something that I'm concerned about right now, because I am designing how it theoretically works when everyone is playing nice. As far as I know the usual approach of "counting done in the presence of observers from all parties" works well enough in most RW scenarios. I remember from my days in university that there are ways to even improve on this via computer assistance, and I can add semi-magical "quantum locks" to prevent tampering, since this is far enough in the future quantum computing will be a thing, but to prevent too much ever-complexity, I think we can assume that direct vote rigging and cheating is not a thing.

That said, I'll add "securing the voting process" to the list of research topics.

Edit:

To prevent wasted votes: you could make voting mandatory, that it, it is illegal not to vote.

There is a distinction to be made here, I think. A "waste" vote is not someone that didn't vote. If they don't want to vote, they just get no representation, but that's their choice. A waste vote is one that was cast, but didn't get a representative. So you voted for Peter, but Peter didn't go to Parliament, so your vote was wasted.

IRV, suggested by Knaight, and that I should've thought of myself, already addresses a lot of the waste by providing a way to quickly select multiple possible representatives in sequence. And if even after IRV your vote is still wasted, that's what the second round addresses.

GW

[Jasdoif]

There is a distinction to be made here, I think. A "waste" vote is not someone that didn't vote. If they don't want to vote, they just get no representation, but that's their choice. A waste vote is one that was cast, but didn't get a representative. So you voted for Peter, but Peter didn't go to Parliament, so your vote was wasted.

IRV, suggested by Knaight, and that I should've thought of myself, already addresses a lot of the waste by providing a way to quickly select multiple possible representatives in sequence. And if even after IRV your vote is still wasted, that's what the second round addresses.

Since IRV (and ranked voting methods in general) produce a ranking, and the exact number of votes is critical on the parliamentary scale....I'm thinking that if you wanted to go the ranked voting route, it'd be a two-pass approach with the same ballots: Determine your X elected candidates by whatever single transferable vote method you prefer, and then each candidate's "score" is the number of ballots where they're ranked higher than any of the other elected candidates. This also ensures the total representation of the district's representatives doesn't exceed the number of ballots/people from the district.

[Tvtyrant]

But why are we using districts at all at this point? Why not just directly nationally vote, and each representative has a pocket vote equal to their share of the national vote? In essence you are doing the same thing but adding in districts that don't serve a purpose that I can see.

The children counting towards votes is wrong IMO. It is virtual representation, an idea that has been abandoned in most places, where it is assumed that someone else has your best interests in mind by default.

Does a parent have more interest in a well run society than a single person? Is a parent more likely to do the right thing for their kid than anyone else, rather than following their own internal code?

Imagine if your utopia let each employer vote for their workers, as of course they have their best interests in mind.

[gomipile]

The waste issue can be avoided by forcing every voter to rank their preference of ALL of the candidates running for office, then apply the transferable vote process until every voter has a vote applied to one of the top three candidates. This still has issues, as explained by CGP Grey in his YouTube series on voting systems.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

The waste issue can be avoided by forcing every voter to rank their preference of ALL of the candidates running for office, then apply the transferable vote process until every voter has a vote applied to one of the top three candidates. This still has issues, as explained by CGP Grey in his YouTube series on voting systems.

Forcing people to vote is something I'm completely against: blank voting and refusal to vote are valid options that should not be denied. For all it's faults, Startship Troopers has it completely right on this topic, IMnpHO:

"Uh, sir, why not go — well, go the limit? Require everyone to [...] vote?"

"Young man, can you restore my eyesight?"

"Sir? Why, no, sir!"

"You would find it much easier than to instill [...] social responsibility [...] into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him.

One of the purposes of the system is to punish bad candidates by removing voting power from them. Candidates in a district whose combined voting power is significantly under the average sends the message to whatever political parties are running in that district that their candidates are sub-par, or that they interests are not being addressed.

But why are we using districts at all at this point? Why not just directly nationally vote, and each representative has a pocket vote equal to their share of the national vote? In essence you are doing the same thing but adding in districts that don't serve a purpose that I can see.

The district limits how many people a representative can represent. It encourages the representative to feel that he represents those people (and not his donors or an abstracted "place"). By making it geographical, it even encourages the representative to meet those people. Voting at large means the voting base could be so distributed as to make any attempt to meet them as a group impossible.

Since IRV (and ranked voting methods in general) produce a ranking, and the exact number of votes is critical on the parliamentary scale....I'm thinking that if you wanted to go the ranked voting route, it'd be a two-pass approach with the same ballots: Determine your X elected candidates by whatever single transferable vote method you prefer, and then each candidate's "score" is the number of ballots where they're ranked higher than any of the other elected candidates. This also ensures the total representation of the district's representatives doesn't exceed the number of ballots/people from the district.

That would be workable, certainly, and would remove the need for the second round, which is a strength in and of itself. I'll consider it. I kinda like the idea of a second round to give a last chance for the voters to face the issue in a simplified manner. The biggest problem with complex voting systems like IRV is that I suspect in practice would turn people off precisely because of the complexity, although admittedly, I'm not sure if that is an actual effect or not.

Grey Wolf

[Knaight]

I'm not sure I follow why you think this would be the case necessarily. I mean, with standard vote anonymity that shouldn't be much of a danger, would it? Any child in such a situation can swear they voted for Alice, but in fact voted for Bob, and the leadership cannot tell.

Mostly it's because having large families is a lot of work. If some political leader in a normal society tells people to have a bunch of kids to make their faction more politically powerful the likely response is along the lines of "Hahaha, no" or "Are you nuts?" or "Go screw yourself". An insular community that's much more fervent is more likely to actually do it, and thus these insular communities are going to be more likely.

I have some actual hard examples of this, but that's a topic for PM. Abstract political systems are one thing, real world examples of specific political groups goes way past the real world politics line. In this particular case, it also goes way past the real world religion line in more than one case.

That would be workable, certainly, and would remove the need for the second round, which is a strength in and of itself. I'll consider it. I kinda like the idea of a second round to give a last chance for the voters to face the issue in a simplified manner. The biggest problem with complex voting systems like IRV is that I suspect in practice would turn people off precisely because of the complexity, although admittedly, I'm not sure if that is an actual effect or not.

It's hard to get actually hard data here (there's not exactly a pair of identical counties that differ only in their voting system to look at), but IRV isn't really that hard to do on the voter end (it's a ranked list) and on the counting end specialists can deal with it. There's certainly no shortage of cases where IRV systems see high participation rates, and they're a lot less susceptible to the "Why vote, I hate both of these people" effect. There's still room for "Why vote, I hate all twelve of these people", but that's somewhat less likely - and to some extent from a psychological perspective rating a group of people you dislike is going to be more palatable to people than voting for someone you dislike.

The waste issue can be avoided by forcing every voter to rank their preference of ALL of the candidates running for office, then apply the transferable vote process until every voter has a vote applied to one of the top three candidates. This still has issues, as explained by CGP Grey in his YouTube series on voting systems.

The ranking can also not have this - there's effectively a line where you would rather someone just have less power, while you trust in people in other districts to do damage control. There's effectively an implicit candidate in the whims of the broader populace, and anyone that doesn't make the list is ranked below them.

If there's a district of a million people, run by Alice (200,000 votes), Bob (150,000 votes), and Chris (50,000 votes), then those low totals are an indication of either political apathy or broad hostility towards all the candidates.

[gomipile]

Forcing people to vote is something I'm completely against: blank voting and refusal to vote are valid options that should not be denied. For all it's faults, Startship Troopers has it completely right on this topic, IMnpHO:

Fine. Give every voter at the polling station the option to rank every candidate in a list. Let them know that if they do so, their vote is guaranteed to be represented in their district's federal legislative power.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Fine. Give every voter at the polling station the option to rank every candidate in a list. Let them know that if they do so, their vote is guaranteed to be represented in their district's federal legislative power.

How? If all million people pick a different candidate, how is their vote guaranteed to be represented? If a person ranks only those candidates that don't make it to parliament, how are they represented? And how does any of that address my concern with not wanting to force people to vote?

I have some actual hard examples of this, but that's a topic for PM.

Oh, I can imagine the examples (although note for the careful: PM is as regulated by board rules as posting; if you can't talk about it in a post, you can't talk about it in a PM either). But I am fine with people telling others how to vote, as long as they can't check or enforce the vote on anyone other than themselves.

GW

[gomipile]

How? If all million people pick a different candidate, how is their vote guaranteed to be represented? If a person ranks only those candidates that don't make it to parliament, how are they represented? And how does any of that address my concern with not wanting to force people to vote?

When I said "if they do so" I meant if they do choose to rank every available candidate. Let them know that if they fail to rank all the candidates, there is a chance their vote won't impact the federal legislature.

[Knaight]

Oh, I can imagine the examples (although note for the careful: PM is as regulated by board rules as posting; if you can't talk about it in a post, you can't talk about it in a PM either). But I am fine with people telling others how to vote, as long as they can't check or enforce the vote on anyone other than themselves.

Yes, but there's exactly two people who might report PMs and one of them is the sender, so in the context of conversations people actually want to have I don't worry about it.

[Murk]

As for "wasted" votes, you could also let the total votes required for the newly formed government to [do something] still be dependent on the total number of allowed voters. That way, a vote for a non-elected member isn't truly wasted: it is also a vote against those who did get elected.

If, say, the amount of votes the government needs to pass a law is 50%, and 40% of the population didn't vote or got their vote wasted, it will be almost impossible for the government to actually function.
How useful this is depends on the kind of society. If it is highly centralised, has elections often, and/or has a small parliament, I can see it work. By "wasting" a vote, you make it harder for those you didn't vote for to hold power.
If the society is decentralised, or with long terms, or a huge parliament, it would work counterproductive. The only people you would make it harder for are the representatives of your own district: by withholding (or wasting) a vote you'd only give those of other districts relatively more power, probably ensuring that their districts turn out better in comparison to yours.

[Jasdoif]

That would be workable, certainly, and would remove the need for the second round, which is a strength in and of itself. I'll consider it. I kinda like the idea of a second round to give a last chance for the voters to face the issue in a simplified manner. The biggest problem with complex voting systems like IRV is that I suspect in practice would turn people off precisely because of the complexity, although admittedly, I'm not sure if that is an actual effect or not.

I think the overwhelming majority of people can figure out how ranking things in order of their preference works. And unless you're requiring an exhaustive ballot that ranks all the candidates, voters can simply stop at the point where they stop caring about the remaining candidates, even if that's just one candidate.

Besides which, a second vote sounds like cause for voters to say "Wait, so if any of the people I vote for win a seat, I'm supposed to go vote for them again?" If it looks like you're meaninglessly cutting into people's personal time with a redundant vote, that's going to turn people off....

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I think the overwhelming majority of people can figure out how ranking things in order of their preference works. And unless you're requiring an exhaustive ballot that ranks all the candidates, voters can simply stop at the point where they stop caring about the remaining candidates, even if that's just one candidate.

We just went through this exercise in the "rank your top ten OotS characters" and that was a non-trivial amount of effort, at least on my part. Ranking requires effort on the "is A better than B", and that effort increases by the square of the number of choices. I strongly suspect that ranked methods like IRV would indeed put off anyone who is not very much into politics. By dividing the election into a primary and a second round to assign voting power, you allow those that don't want to think that hard over which N politicians they like the most to, once the decision has been simplified down to a manageable number, they can then select who they would want to represent them.

And while yes, there is the risk that none will represent their interest... well, that's what the "a representative only gets as many votes as his district is actually willing to give them" comes into play. If the primaries are won by candidates that then cannot command a significant participation in the vote transfer, that district will be powerless for a cycle, and then hopefully the candidate pool will improve. I admit "loss of power for the district" being the main "punishment" for bad candidates is not quite ideal, but I am not sure I can think of a different one

Besides which, a second vote sounds like cause for voters to say "Wait, so if any of the people I vote for win a seat, I'm supposed to go vote for them again?" If it looks like you're meaninglessly cutting into people's personal time with a redundant vote, that's going to turn people off....

Again, the kind of people willing to invest the time and energy of going through a full IRV process are likely the kind of people who won't mind then explicitly voting who best will represent their interest. Will it be their original top choice? Maybe. But from what I see in France, two-step election systems do not seem to impact participation.

Honestly, I think there is little difference in practice between IRV with "top choice automatically gets the vote, but any others still count towards the district representative pool" versus IRV primary and second round for vote assignation. The first's strength is getting the election over in a single vote, the second offers more levels of flexibility for different levels of political engagement. Comparing the two, I'd go for the flexibility over convenience, but not by much.

---

As an aside, I have been trying to think of a way to differentiate between blank votes and uncast votes. I'm thinking a blank vote would be a negative vote - an explicit "I want to reduce the voting power of these representatives". All blank votes would form a pool, that would be evenly distributed amongst all N candidates. A Candidate reduced to 0 or fewer votes would not even take up a seat in the Parliament.

This is a fairly new idea, so I'm expecting there might be issues I still need to think through.

Grey Wolf

[Jasdoif]

Honestly, I think there is little difference in practice between IRV with "top choice automatically gets the vote, but any others still count towards the district representative pool" versus IRV primary and second round for vote assignation. The first's strength is getting the election over in a single vote, the second offers more levels of flexibility for different levels of political engagement. Comparing the two, I'd go for the flexibility over convenience, but not by much.

Well, if your setting has the means to pull off securely and reliably tying an individual to their ballots, you could do both: Someone who doesn't vote in the second election is counted with results from their first ballot, so if someone hasn't changed their minds they don't have to do anything, but if they have then the option is there for them to express the change in their opinion.

As an aside, I have been trying to think of a way to differentiate between blank votes and uncast votes. I'm thinking a blank vote would be a negative vote - an explicit "I want to reduce the voting power of these representatives". All blank votes would form a pool, that would be evenly distributed amongst all N candidates. A Candidate reduced to 0 or fewer votes would not even take up a seat in the Parliament.

This is a fairly new idea, so I'm expecting there might be issues I still need to think through.

Conceptually, doing this adds another layer of complexity: If you like one candidate but not as much as you dislike the others, and believe/hope the other districts have better choices; is it better to vote "positive" for one and "neutral" for the others, or "negative" for them all?

If you're early in the brainstorming phase, you might consider a "non-blank ballots to total ballots" multiplier on "parliamentary score" for the district. It still has most of the same problems, but magnifies impact on popular candidates instead of unpopular candidates, and wouldn't have edge cases where all candidates are underwater and a district goes unrepresented...or a cause to consider special handling of those cases, or a need to consider whether the special handling would make torpedoing an election beneficial in some circumstances.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Well, if your setting has the means to pull off securely and reliably tying an individual to their ballots, you could do both: Someone who doesn't vote in the second election is counted with results from their first ballot, so if someone hasn't changed their minds they don't have to do anything, but if they have then the option is there for them to express the change in their opinion.

Yes, if that was the case, that'd be ideal, but I think that is literally impossible with ensured anonymity.

Conceptually, doing this adds another layer of complexity: If you like one candidate but not as much as you dislike the others, and believe/hope the other districts have better choices; is it better to vote "positive" for one and "neutral" for the others, or "negative" for them all?

Fair enough.

If you're early in the brainstorming phase, you might consider a "non-blank ballots to total ballots" multiplier on "parliamentary score" for the district. It still has most of the same problems, but magnifies impact on popular candidates instead of unpopular candidates, and wouldn't have edge cases where all candidates are underwater and a district goes unrepresented...or a cause to consider special handling of those cases, or a need to consider whether the special handling would make torpedoing an election beneficial in some circumstances.

Early enough I'm open to all suggestions. If I understand this correctly, the percentage of blank votes would be applied to the total vote count? So, for example:
100k votes for Alice
50k votes for Bob
50k votes for Charlotte
40k blank votes in total (20%)

Results:
Alice: 100k*.8 = 80k votes
Bob: 50k*.8 = 40k votes
Charlotte: 50k*.8 = 40k votes

It does have the advantage that unless every vote is blank, Alice & co. will all get at least a portion of votes. I'll need to do run through a few examples to see just how this switch from absolute votes to proportional votes changes things before I form an opinion. But then, this was a half-baked idea to start with, so not much loss there.

GW

[Jasdoif]

Early enough I'm open to all suggestions. If I understand this correctly, the percentage of blank votes would be applied to the total vote count? So, for example:
100k votes for Alice
50k votes for Bob
50k votes for Charlotte
40k blank votes in total (20%)

Results:
Alice: 100k*.8 = 80k votes
Bob: 50k*.8 = 40k votes
Charlotte: 50k*.8 = 40k votes

It does have the advantage that unless every vote is blank, Alice & co. will all get at least a portion of votes. I'll need to do run through a few examples to see just how this switch from absolute votes to proportional votes changes things before I form an opinion. But then, this was a half-baked idea to start with, so not much loss there.

Yes, that's what I meant.

(I've toyed with the notion of making "none of these" votes count differently than not voting, myself; but the approach I came up with that seemed satisfactory involved a system of approval voting and a threshold where if any candidates receive above 50% approval then only those candidates are considered, so "none of these" votes can push a candidate below the threshold and out of easily grabbing more points/delegates/arbitrary-units. It's too different from your system to really apply there, I think.)

[lt_murgen]

As for "wasted" votes, you could also let the total votes required for the newly formed government to [do something] still be dependent on the total number of allowed voters. That way, a vote for a non-elected member isn't truly wasted: it is also a vote against those who did get elected.

If, say, the amount of votes the government needs to pass a law is 50%, and 40% of the population didn't vote or got their vote wasted, it will be almost impossible for the government to actually function.
How useful this is depends on the kind of society. If it is highly centralised, has elections often, and/or has a small parliament, I can see it work. By "wasting" a vote, you make it harder for those you didn't vote for to hold power.
If the society is decentralised, or with long terms, or a huge parliament, it would work counterproductive. The only people you would make it harder for are the representatives of your own district: by withholding (or wasting) a vote you'd only give those of other districts relatively more power, probably ensuring that their districts turn out better in comparison to yours.

Also, the system as described only enhances the desire by candidates to get more people in their districts to like them. And that leads to trading votes for pork-barrel projects that benefit your district. On the flip side, you would make your candidates fear taking a strong stance on any issue, one way or the other, for fear of isolating a portion of your district. This leads to candidates that with similar platforms and accruing similar voting power.

[Jasdoif]

Yes, if that was the case, that'd be ideal, but I think that is literally impossible with ensured anonymity.

Depending on how far you want anonymity ensured....


Suppose it's a two-piece system, consisting of a small data-bearing item each voter receives upon placing their vote in the first system, and a giant database...somewhere. When the vote is placed, a unique identifier is created in the database and the vote is stored with it, along with some sort of biometric reading passed through a Bloom filter...and the item is encoded with the unique identifier and the same biometric reading passed through a completely uncorrelated Bloom filter. To participate in the second vote, you need to bring the item with you, so your biometric identity can be authenticated in both places and then your vote adjusted for the second round.

Because the vote is only stored on the database, grabbing the item doesn't reveal the vote on its own; and because Bloom filters allow false positives but not false negatives, this would always work for the correct person but could possibly pass for someone else...meaning that finding a match doesn't prove it's their ballot. And using two uncorrelated filters means you'd need access to the item and the database to have the full accuracy of matches; and the precision of the filter algorithms themselves can be tuned to the desired spot on the spectrum between security and anonymity.


Now, I wouldn't want to be the one in charge of securing such a system But we're already assuming how this works in the vote-fraud-less scenario.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Now, I wouldn't want to be the one in charge of securing such a system But we're already assuming how this works in the vote-fraud-less scenario.

Unfortunately, the worse case scenario here is someone threatened into voting who goes into the booth but doesn't actually vote, and whose mcGuffin is then seized by the person doing the forcing, who then checks and finds out that the person did not in fact vote.

Given that this would just for convenience rather than to increase the security or anonymity of the vote, it doesn't seem worth it.

Now, we could discuss how we could have a secure, anonymous remote voting process, so that we can have both convenience and still security and anonymity. I picture a VR-helmet & biometric ID who a person wears. In the private confines of the helmet, the user is presented with a virtual environment where they select their options (which are randomized, so you can't deduce what they picked from their movements outside the helmet).

But like you said, I would not be the one wanting to secure that system. And I'm not even worried about man-in-the-middle attacks; the weakest point of any electronic voting system is trusting the software itself.


(link to original)

Grey Wolf

[Jasdoif]

Unfortunately, the worse case scenario here is someone threatened into voting who goes into the booth but doesn't actually vote, and whose mcGuffin is then seized by the person doing the forcing, who then checks and finds out that the person did not in fact vote.

I believe you've just identified why the vote itself is not encoded in the item (which is not actually a macguffin, since the item has an actual use in the plot ).

Ultimately though, it's your setting. All I can do is be like "hey, this could conceivably accomplish what you said would be ideal", and let you decide if the implications behind it are worth devoting attention to and/or discarding the idea (or for that matter, if the potential for failure is more interesting then it working as expected).

---

Something you might find interesting, if not directly relevant, is Mixed member proportional. Basically everyone votes for a representative from their district and a national party (not necessarily the party of the local representative); the district winners go on to the legislature, and parties are allotted additional representatives as needed so the overall party makeup of the legislature is proportional to the overall results of the party aspect of the vote.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I believe you've just identified why the vote itself is not encoded in the item (which is not actually a macguffin, since the item has an actual use in the plot ).

Ultimately though, it's your setting. All I can do is be like "hey, this could conceivably accomplish what you said would be ideal", and let you decide if the implications behind it are worth devoting attention to and/or discarding the idea (or for that matter, if the potential for failure is more interesting then it working as expected).

To be absolutely clear: I have found your input extremely helpful. Please do not think otherwise. I'm poking at your ideas like I poke at everything. I am currently thinking through the implications of not allowing people to vote in both elections. You can vote in the complicated one if you wish (and then use your "top representative that goes through gets your vote automatically) and for those that don't want to think that hard, a second election to just pick between a reduced pool, but no-one gets to do both. If you didn't list any of the candidates that went through, well, you don't get a second chance to do so.

My concern with that is that last group of people, though. It feels like it might reduce participation of the first stage, "just in case", which would make the primaries a little too insular.

Something you might find interesting, if not directly relevant, is Mixed member proportional. Basically everyone votes for a representative from their district and a national party (not necessarily the party of the local representative); the district winners go on to the legislature, and parties are allotted additional representatives as needed so the overall party makeup of the legislature is proportional to the overall results of the party aspect of the vote.

I'll check it out.

Grey Wolf

[erikun]

Since you are dealing with a purely theoretical and highly technogical society, why not implement the option to people who didn't get a candidate into office a choice to vote for one of them? As in, abstainers, blank voters, and people who voted for another candidate have the option to vote for one of the three (or however many) that made it in, would then have the option to put their vote towards one of the successful candidates. People would have the option to support a lesser known candidate without worry that their vote would end up "uncounted", and people who disliked all three would still have the option to abstain. Assuming that we are talking about a purely automated system, it would be able to contact the people who required the second vote while being no more vulnerable than the normal voting procedure in place.

I'm not sure how well I feel about counting "blank" votes towards all candidates. If somebody opposes all the candidates which made it into the government, then they should have the option of withholding their voting power from those people. Otherwise, it's just a top-three popularity contest, with everybody else's vote going to them regardless - that seems to undercut the whole point you're trying to set up. If a candidate wants to have more voting power, then they should work at receiving the most voted from their populace. They shouldn't be encouraged to undercut the other two top candidates knowing that they'll get a larger percentage of the undecided vote as a result.