[EM] New Hugo (Science Fiction Award) voting method
Richard Lung
voting at ukscientists.com
Thu Aug 27 12:40:09 PDT 2015
Hello Jameson Quinn,
I used to be a science fiction reader. I'm too old for the new
generation.
The organisation Democracy 2000 also told me that audiences, they tried,
found STV too difficult.
In principle, tho, it's very simple. You just have to go back to the
invention of proportional representation in 1821, by Thomasd Wright
Hill, with the school-boys queueing behind their favorites for a
committee, and shifting away from the most popular, who don't need
surplus votes, and shifting from least popular candidates, with no
chance of making the quota. The quota can be replaced by a chalk line
for required length of queue for election. And there is no need for any
arithmetic at all.
It's just the incident of the loaves and the fishes. I believe
transferable voting is the way to go. And have invented improvements:
Binomial STV. The preferential computation is difficult, even more so,
with my version.
But I look at it this way. Democracy cannot be left at the prehistoric
gatherer society stage of social evolution, while everything else is
subject to division of labor and ever more technical specialisation.
And to tell you the truth, I find non-transferable voting elections opaque.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Lung.
On 27/08/2015 00:43, Jameson Quinn wrote:
> Yes, I was the designer of this system, and I was there at Worldcon to
> get it passed.
>
> What was needed was a proportional system based on approval ballots.
> There are of course a number of options in this vein. Within these
> limitations, this system was designed for:
>
> -Relative simplicity of explanation. I found that explaining STV-like
> systems which are top-down and so require keeping track of how "used
> up" a ballot is were too hard to explain.
> -Resistance to "bullet voting" strategy, since widespread use of such
> strategy would weaken the non-slate voters against slate voters.
>
> It is like IRV in that it is a bottom-up elimination system. However,
> it was in no way "based on" IRV, and in fact it differs in one key
> regard: it looks at the whole of each ballot from step one, instead of
> ignoring all but one of the choices on each ballot at any given time.
>
> I'd be happy to answer any further questions about it here.
>
> Jameson
>
> 2015-08-24 13:22 GMT-04:00 <mrouse1 at mrouse.com
> <mailto:mrouse1 at mrouse.com>>:
>
> That would be awesome -- there are too many emails over there to
> read in one sitting! :)
> Mike
>
>
> On 2015-08-24 10:49, Andy Jennings wrote:
>
> Jameson Quinn, who's on this list, was working with the Hugo
> awards to
> come up with this system.
>
> I believe he proposed simple systems first, but several
> wrinkles came
> up which necessitated the complexity.
>
> I'll email him and see if I can get him to chime in here.
>
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 8:29 AM, <mrouse1 at mrouse.com
> <mailto:mrouse1 at mrouse.com>> wrote:
>
> As an addendum, they are calling this method "single divisible
> vote with least popular elimination," which I haven't heard of
> before.
>
> Mike
>
> On 2015-08-24 04:06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 08/24/2015 02:27 AM, Michael Rouse wrote:
>
> I'm not sure how many people here are fans of science
> fiction, but
> there
> was a big brouhaha at this years awards (which I'll
> ignore), and
> one of
> the results was the proposal of a new method of choosing
> winners:
>
> *Short Title: E Pluribus Hugo (Out of the Many, a Hugo)*
> Moved, to amend section 3.8 (Tallying of Nominations),
> section 3.9
> (Notification and Acceptance), and section 3.11 (Tallying
> of Votes)
> as
> follows:
>
> [snip]
>
> So this is basically cumulative voting IRV? I suppose it's
> better
> than
> ordinary IRV, but if they're using an Approval ballot, why
> not just
> use
> Approval to begin with?
>
> Do they want a proportional representation method or a
> majoritarian
> one?
> The reference to avoiding slates seem to suggest to me
> that they
> want a
> proportional representation method, or at least something
> that is
> closer
> to a PR method.
>
> As a positional elimination method, it could suffer path
> dependence.
> Consider someone nominating (voting for) X, Y, and Z. Say
> now that
> Y is
> very narrowly eliminated at some point, but if the person
> had voted
> for
> X and Y alone, he would have given enough of his vote to Y
> to have
> kept
> Y from being eliminated. So the claim that "[i]n other
> words, you
> can
> safely nominate anything you feel is Hugo-worthy" doesn't
> seem to
> be
> strictly true. You can safely nominate anything that is
> relatively
> unpopular, but if it gets popular enough, it may draw enough
> support
> away from the others you would also like to nominate.
>
> If I were to construct a majoritarian ballot system with
> Approval
> ballots, I would just use Approval. There's a similar
> "drawing away
> from
> other popular candidates" problem (the chicken/Burr
> thing), but
> Approval
> is much simpler and doesn't repeated iteration.
>
> For PR, the question is much harder. With computers, you
> could use
> PAV,
> sequential PAV or birational voting. However, the
> non-sequential
> ones
> require a lot of recounts and are probably not feasible
> for manual
> elections. Sequential ones are simpler but the proportionality
> might not
> be obvious.
>
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em
> [1] for
> list info
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em
> [1] for
> list info
>
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://electorama.com/em
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em
> for list info
>
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
> list info
>
>
>
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20150827/2b4e9be8/attachment.htm>
More information about the Election-Methods
mailing list