[EM] Helping the Texas Green Party use PAV...

[Neal McBurnett]

Thanks. I'm very glad to see that!  I'm a huge fan of PAV.

I joined the Discord discussion, which notes:

> The Green Party of Texas are supposed to use "Proportional Approval
Voting" for purposes of delegate apportionment for allocating our 26
delegates for the Presidential nomination.

The Green Party candidates for president are (first names): Howie Dario
Kent Sedinam Susan Dennis David Chad and NOTA.

See details at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Green_Party_presidential_primaries

A copy of the ballots etc. was shared on Discord.

There I noted that one way to do this sort of thing with PAV would be to
have delegates explicitly run. Then people can approve of however many
delegates they want, and you pick the top 26 via PAV.  Then the delegates
can use whatever scheme you want to select the overall winner. But that
would be an unusual procedure.

Note also that I have put Python code for PAV up at
https://github.com/nealmcb/pr_voting_methods

There I also analyzed some real-world data from Block Plurality elections
in Colorado via PAV.

But back to the delegate allocation question at hand...

I dare say the question conventionally is more like an apportionment
procedure, as used for allocating seats in congress to states, or seats in
the legislatures of most countries to parties.

In many countries, they use "highest averages methods" (also known as
"divisor methods").
Democrats in the US use the largest remainder method (also known as
Hare–Niemeyer method, Hamilton method or as Vinton's method).

Both have strengths and weaknesses under different circumstances:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_averages_method
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_remainder_method

Recently I ran across what seems to be a grand-unification theory of sorts,
I guess.

Multiwinner Approval Rules as Apportionment Methods
 Markus Brill University of Oxford mbrill at cs.ox.ac.uk Jean-Franc¸ois
Laslier Paris School of Economics jean-francois.laslier at ens.fr Piotr
Skowron University of Oxford piotr.skowron at cs.ox.ac.uk
 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08691.pdf

> We establish a link between multiwinner elections and apportionment
problems by showing how approval-based multiwinner election rules can be
interpreted as methods of apportionment.  We consider several multiwinner
rules and observe that they induce apportionment methods that are
well-established in the literature on proportional representation. For
instance, we show that Proportional Approval Voting induces the D’Hondt
method and that Monroe’s rule induces the largest remainder method. We also
consider properties of apportionment methods and exhibit multiwinner rules
that induce apportionment methods satisfying these properties.

But I haven't digested it yet.

Thoughts?

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 8:54 PM Rob Lanphier <robla at robla.net> wrote:

> Hi Forest (and everyone else on EM),
>
> As I found out today, the Texas Green Party is using PAV for delegate
> counts.
> Someone from the party joined the Discord server operated by The
> Center for Election Science, and is trying to figure out vote totals
> for PAV.
>
> Remind me to send a summary later if I don't follow up.  I'm still in
> a real-time discussion as of right now.
>
> Here's a direct link to get an invite to the Discord server (if you
> aren't on it)
> https://discord.gg/vxzeh4B
>
> Rob
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>


-- 
Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/
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