[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 223, Issue 45: Richard Lung's contribution

steve bosworth stevebosworth at hotmail.com
Tue Feb 28 21:52:10 PST 2023



Today's Topics:

   TO: Richar Lung
  FROM: Steve Bosworth
Richard, in response to your appropriate valuing of "multi-member range of representation" in your contribution fully repeated below, I wonder whether you might see the use of grades rather than numbers in my description of evaluative proportional representation (EPR) as even more appreciative of "the consideration that individual candidates hold an over-lapping group or "party" of opinions. Voters support for parties themselves become less and less partisan with more particular choices of parties in proportionally elected multi-member constituencies. So, it may be the CW becomes less and less an absolute individual choice, within the wider context of personal proportional representation, in multi-member constituencies."
Evaluative Proportional Representation

EPR invites you to vote most expressively by grading at least one candidate’s suitability for office as either Excellent, Very Good, Good, or Acceptable. You can grade Poor or Reject for any candidates you find unacceptable to hold office. You can award the same grade to more than one candidate. As follows, you are guaranteed that your one EPR vote of at least Acceptable will quantitatively increase the voting power (weighted vote) in the council of the elected candidate who you awarded the “highest possible grade”.

How EPR Counts Grades


For an EPR at-large election of a seven-member council, each of the seven elected candidates must have received one of the seven largest numbers of grades of at least Acceptable from all the ballots cast. Your vote and every other citizen’s vote are added to one of the different weighted votes that will be held by one of the elected members of the council. The council represents 100% of the votes cast – no vote is wasted in the sense that it does not help any candidate to win.


Except in two circumstances, your one vote adds to the weighted vote in the council of the

highest-graded candidate on your ballot. If you awarded this highest grade to more than one candidate, it is exclusively added to the candidate who will have the largest number of these grades as a result. This is justified by the democratic assumption that, other things being equal, the candidate with a larger number of votes is probably better.


The first exception is when that candidate has received too few grades of at least Acceptable from all the ballots cast to be elected. In this event, your ballot is automatically transferred to the candidate on your ballot to whom you awarded your remaining highest grade. If no such eligible candidate is graded on your ballot, your ballot automatically becomes your proxy vote. This proxy is finally added to the weighted vote of the elected candidate publicly judged by your highest-graded candidate to be most fit for office. You can prohibit this use of your proxy vote by specifying this on your ballot.


The second exception can result from your highest-graded candidate having received too many highest grades from all the ballots cast. To avoid the remote but anti-democratic possibility of an elected candidate being able to dictate to the council by retaining more than 50% of all the weighted votes in the council, our EPR algorithm does not allow a member to retain more than 20% of all the votes cast. This requires at least three members to agree before any majority decision can be made in the council. If the candidate to whom you gave your highest grade received more than 20% of the votes, your ballot could be selected by lot as one of the surplus ballots to be automatically transferred to the remaining highest-graded candidate on your ballot. If no such eligible candidate is graded on your ballot, your ballot automatically becomes your proxy vote and is transferred to the weighted vote of one of the winners as described earlier. As a result, your EPR vote equally adds to the weighted vote of the winner who finally receives your highest grade, remaining highest grade, or proxy vote – the winner you are most likely to see as representing your hopes and concerns accurately. As a result, each EPR council member has a different weighted vote in the council, exactly equal to the total number of ballots counted for them. [Feel free to ask for the published article; Appendix A for a full verbal description of the EPR count; the EPR algorithm; or the report of the output for the count of our simulated EPR election. (stevebosworth at hotmail.com)]

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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2023 04:28:18 +0000
From: Richard Lung <voting at ukscientists.com>
To: Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>
Cc: EM <Election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] Worst Loser Elimination 2.0
Message-ID: <9395A19F-634A-4979-8D96-055D5C6B38F1 at ukscientists.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"


Elimination methods may have a policy mandate but they do not have a scientific or knowledge mandate. They violate conservation of (preference) information. Elimination independent of scale of preference is precisely the fault, found over two centuries ago, by Pierre-Simon Laplace, according to JFS Ross, with Condorcet pairing elimination of candidates. It does not take into account the relative importance of higher to lower preferences. Why Laplace sided with Borda amounted to his opening the way to rational counts of preference ranges. Of which Gregory supplied the definitive statistical method to next preferences, of weighting in arithmetic proportion.

It is doubtful whether the Condorcet Winner (or conversely Loser) applies to more than single winner elections, the least democratic, lacking multi-member range of representation. This perhaps may be demonstrated by the consideration that individual candidates hold an over-lapping group or "party" of opinions. Voters support for parties themselves become less and less partisan with more particular choices of parties in proportionally elected multi-member constituencies. So, it may be the CW becomes less and less an absolute individual choice, within the wider context of personal proportional representation, in multi-member constituencies.

Regards,
Richard Lung.

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