Edward B. Foley, a Professor of Law at The Ohio State University, recently posted on Election Law Blog a proposal for “Total Vote Runoff” (“TVR”), which is like Single Winner RCV, except for the vote transfer methodology. Instead of using only first place (and transferred first place) votes to decide which candidates are eliminated, he proposes calculating each remaining candidate’s “Total Votes” score using Borda count, then eliminating the candidate with the lowest Total Vote score before votes are transferred to each voter’s next choice candidate. This continues until one candidate has a majority of votes.
For example, in a four candidate election with a single winner, if no candidate received a majority of first choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes would not necessarily be eliminated, as is the case with standard single winner RCV. Instead, a Total Votes score would be calculated for each candidate using the following formula:
(3 x # of first choice votes) + (2 x # of second choice votes) + (1 x # of third choice votes) + (0 x # of fourth choice votes).
Therefore, each voter would be allocating six (3+2+1) Total Vote score points among all four candidates. If a voter did not rank all four candidates, the unused points would be evenly split among the unranked candidates, including fractional points.
The candidate with the lowest Total Votes score would be eliminated, with each affected voter’s vote then transferred to their next choice candidate.
This process would continue with three or two remaining candidates until someone had a majority of votes or had more votes if only two candidates remain.
Mr. Foley argues that there is a greater chance of a single winner candidate having majority support with the TVR methodology than with the standard RCV vote transfer process. He cites evidence from the August 2022 US House election in Alaska that “non-MAGA” Republican candidate Nick Begich was probably more popular with voters than Representative-elect Mary Peltola, but had fewer first choice votes than Sarah Palin, and was therefore eliminated first in the three-way race using the standard RCV vote transfer process.
His close to finished draft article on TVR, soon to be published in the University of New Hampshire Law Review, can be read here:
CONDORCET 1780S –
RCV DONE RIGHT
Prove it.
—1—2—3—T
A-26–25–0–51
B-25–26–2–53
Z-49—0–51–100
T-100-51–53–204
WHO WINS ???
Huh? What does that even begin to mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Condorcet
COMPARED TO THE TOO MANY TO COUNT NEW BARBARIAN AGE 0.666 IQ TROLL MORONS WHO LOVE PLURALITY, MINORITY RULE AND TYRANTS.
You still have not made any sense. Maybe one day. Probably not.
AZ’s gibberish makes no sense.
All forms of RCV only help communists and thus should not be used.
It appears that this method is more likely to determine the Condorcet winner, than the method currently used in Alaska.
Anyway, the major flaw of the method used in Alaska is that it deprives the parties of determining who may run with the party label.
@WZ,
Who constitutes a political party in your model?
Meh. I still prefer score voting. It’s easier for voters to understand, easier to calculate vote totals, and has fewer screwy outcomes than ranked choice.
I say let’s try it.
Walter Ziobro is right on one of his points: Alaska-style final four and Foley’s method both have the purpose and the result of weakening political parties and therefore are undemocratic. He is almost right on his point about the Condorcet criterion. Foley’s method (which is called Baldwin’s method in the social choice literature, although Foley chooses not to use that label), guarantees the election of the Condorcet winner when there is one. As a result, it can elect a candidate who is almost everyone’s second choice but almost no one’s first choice. Because Foley thinks that the purpose of elections is to always choose the most “centrist” candidate, he views this as a feature rather than a bug.
“Who constitutes a political party in your model?”
A political party is a private, voluntary association, as per Eu v San Francisco.
Jim said:
“I still prefer score voting”
The problem with score voting is that partisans will ALWAYS give a max score to their nominees, and ZERO scores to any opponent. When folks catch on to this, all be the most indifferent voters will vote likewise, making it virtually the same as plurality voting, except for a handful of voters.
The printing of ballots is the cause of any problems or dilemma with whether a political party is public, private, or some sort of hybrid. Therefore, it would be better if elections were in person by voice vote or standing count. The exaggerated downsides of public on the record voting have been brought up by a couple of times, but never seriously weighed against the counterarguments that voting is political power and unaccountable power is dangerous. I’ve made the case that voting should be public for the same reasons that legislative and congressional votes should be public. That is, if legislators should be accountable for their votes, shouldn’t voters be accountable for which legislators they elect to cast those votes?
If, as many here maintain, voters should vote on legislation directly, shouldn’t they be just as accountable for the passage of legislation that they voted in as when legislators do it? The chicken little arguments about open warfare, mass lynching, or other such nonsense don’t hold up in view of historical evidence. There may be some social consequences of voting incorrectly, but my view is that this is a good thing more than a bad thing, and helps prevent bad legislation from passing and bad legislators from being elected. My ideal system has no legislators at all, but I am speaking of the less than ideal real world case.
The range of such social consequences would mostly work as a deterrent. At most it might involve people seeking employment, business partnerships or business client relationships with more like minded people, tending to live in areas where most people think as they do, socially associating with people who think politically along their lines, etc. This is already happening anyway, and the main fault there is that government has become way too big, in every sense: scope, complexity, scale, centralization at levels of population and distance that remove personal influence of the relatively average person, involvement in far too many aspects of life.
If government was a relatively minor part of people’s lives, cost a lot less, and was much more local and personal, people would be unlikely to face significant consequences for their publicly known political opinions. It’s publicly known what church if any people attend, what brand of vehicle they choose to drive, which competing local sports teams or drinking or other hang out establishments they prefer, what university they and their kids went to or support in athletic competition, and many other things, and all those choices can potentially have social consequences, but they don’t result in armed gang warfare or purges or any of that other nonsense.
If political choices could even potentially do so, it’s because politics has become far too important and all encompassing because government is way too big, nosy, and removed from local human scale. In my analysis, it has become that way and continues to get worse in part because of lack of social consequences for how people vote. Institutions such as business councils, neighborhood associations, churches, etc would pose a social consequence bulwark or counterweight against all encompassing government power, and division of power is a good thing.
Or, people would live in local areas where their opinions are in more harmony with the local population, and perhaps move to areas which are more successful because they implement better policies, provided they are willing to pay some costs and go through some vetting that they are the the type of person or family that the folks already living there want to live near.
Either way, the problem of social values and economic decisions being imposed from thousands of miles away by politicians elected by or legislation passed by hundreds of millions of anonymous people is far worse. The problem of massive crime , coddling of criminals, population replacement, forced secularization and integration, multigeneratiobal welfare, poorly run government schools and housing, destruction of families and family values, manipulated public opinion, red tape binding industry, globalism, cultural Marxism, feminazi gender benders, anti law enforcement and anti military attitudes, permissive sex and drug culture, destruction of parental authority, stolen and manipulated elections, environmental extremism, victim disarmament, etc, etc is a consequence in part of anonymous voting, although that’s only part of the problem.
Technically nonpartisan voting tends to centralize power in the hands of the most well connected and organized factions, since they have more ability to promote their candidates and recruit candidates they like, etc. Government printing of parties on ballots introduces fights over which parties do or do not belong, and additional unnecessary complexity. Then you get more unneeded arguing over how parties choose their candidates and whether that’s an internal or public matter. In person standing count voting removes all those problems all at once. People voting for local people they know well, and all the voters being well known to each other in many capacities that do not involve politics, would greatly reduce social and economic problems.
Counterarguments? Logic? Historical evidence? Please, make a rational case of why I’m wrong, if I’m wrong.
If they are a private organization why should they have the privilege of placing their nominees on the ballot?
Is this any different than a private organization appropriating public spaces for their private economic activities?
“If they are a private organization why should they have the privilege of placing their nominees on the ballot?”
Ballots were originally produced by parties themselves, and given out at polling places on election day. The state then confiscated the formerly private ballots, and mandated that voters use the state-produced ballots.
If the state mandates the use of their ballots, at the very minimum, they must provide write-in spaces. And, they must provide some sort of mechanism whereby any political party can earn a line on the ballot to display their own candidates.
Thanks to modern technology, this can now be more easily done than ever. States can produce model ballots with the names of the qualifying candidates and parties, and write-in spaces whereby voters or parties can access the ballots on-line, and print in the names of their preferred candidates, print out the ballot, and delivery it to the polling places.
It is extremely unreasonable and unrealistic to expect average voters to seriously research numerous candidates for numerous offices. They have many other things to focus on in life, their individual vote has an extremely low chance of changing the outcome of any election, and they are very ill prepared for such a task by several generations of dumbing down of the herd through miseducation, population replacement, literally doping down the public with poisonous narcotics on an industrial scale, and many other ways the critical mass of voters are rendered extremely incapable of such in depth analysis if for some very strange reason all but a vanishingly tiny percentage of them even wanted to do it or found the time.
As well, voters are likely to judge candidates on illogical bases such as their looks, if they like the sound of their name, at times mistaken identity, lying campaign ads and promises, of course incumbency, etc.
Thus, there will inevitably be some organizations that recruit and promote candidates they like and help them catch the attention of voters, file mountains of government paperwork, produce and distribute campaign propaganda of various types and formats on any number of platforms , hone issue positions, attract, train, and manage campaign volunteers and paid staff, raise funds, identify likely supporters and persuadable individuals or groups, pay campaign debts, rise up through the ranks, and so on.
These organizations can be above board and publicly identified with their candidates, with their organizational platform and track record of other candidates they elected as a way to help judge the many candidates running for many offices and make the research time to study candidates manageable for average people, far too many of whom are qualified to vote, which makes the problem significantly worse.
For candidates, having their party alongside their name on the ballot, if there is to be a ballot, is increasingly important if they are not wealthy and well connected, and if their ideas are somewhat outside the mainstream or establishment debate. This gives them a much better chance of helping build a base of support over time for a set of ideas or proposals which can eventually help them get elected to something one day, or at least help elect other people who agree with them down the line somewhere. Even if they reliably fail to win anything anywhere, they may impress some voters, issue lobbying groups, winning candidates etc with at least some of their ideas.
Or, they may swing the outcome of enough elections to get the winning candidates to start adopting some of their proposals. The existence of such an ongoing base of support helps recruit other candidates who agree with their ideas but are not either already very wealthy, well known and well connected, or conversely completely insane delusional people with an extremely unrealistic assessment of their chances to win or even be noticed in any significant way and little if anything to lose by drawing embarrassing attention to themselves if they draw any at all. In the middle are fairly rational people who realize their chances to win any significant office are very low, lack the money or connections to suddenly change those odds, know their ideas may be new or unpopular and unlikely to immediately gain traction all at once, but see incremental value in slowly over time build a base of support for some of their ideas and other candidates who advance those ideas with a party label. Thus, merely printing the names of individuals and not parties on a ballot tilts the political playing field towards already well known, well connected, well financed individuals and groups, as opposed to listing both the individuals and parties, or better yet just the parties.
If my proposal for in person open voting and standing counts were adopted instead, it’s a lot more practical to have party sections of the election hall which voters can join, with time for speeches to persuade voters to pick or switch sides and personal lobbying among people who know each other, as opposed to multiple separate votes throughout the night on however many candidates for however many offices, a process likely to create nothing but confusion and errors.
If your goal is to make the election process relatively more above board, have politicians judged relatively more on the basis of ideas than looks or other such distractions, give ideas that start out as extreme and little known and individuals who start out as little known, little connected, not very wealthy, and maybe not otherwise thinking of themselves as potential candidates for political office or as being involved in politics or campaigns a chance to come together and over time persuade the public, having party names listed on the ballot or as sections of the voting hall for voters to stand in is better than candidates just being personal names on the ballot or individuals in front of a crowd with little time to make their case and whatever groups support them having sole burden to make the candidates they support and their support of them widely known and understood among voters.
If, on the other hand, you want to consolidate political power and make it harder for outsiders to break through, it makes sense to just list individual candidates names. This amplifies advantages candidates have over others by virtue of being well known, well connected, well financed, and having conventional ideas and establishment backing.
So, does Jim Riley think making it relatively easier for outsiders to break through and unconventional ideas more of a chance to incrementally persuade people , gather a base of support, and possibly become widely adopted and perhaps implemented would be a good or bad thing, as opposed to making it more difficult? Is it better to concentrate power or disperse it? Should it be easier it harder for more voters to have a better understanding of where more candidates stand as opposed to only relying on what are likely lying campaign promises and ads or even just the sound of names they don’t recognize at all or may identify with a completely different individual? Aside from Jim Riley and AZ who if anyone here thinks nonpartisan elections would be better? If you think so, please answer the same questions.
If I am incorrect as to which set of outcomes printing party names on ballots (or having voting by party in an election hall) is more likely to lead to compared to having candidates run individually without party identification immediately attached, please explain why you think I’m wrong about this particular point, regardless of what extent if any you agree or disagree with my overall hypothesis of ideal case proposals.
As to the question of which parties should then have access and on what basis, my ideal solution is that to be entitled to a section of the election hall and time to make speeches or otherwise persuade voters to join their side, a party should at a minimum have a precinct captain who took several months to readily identify that party in that precinct and his personal identification with that party, and gave everyone who may have any questions a chance to ask them, including in person, in public places, or at the party precinct captain’s home or place of business, or through whatever means of communication people use in that time and place (phone , email, snail mail, carrier pigeon, technologies not yet invented, etc). That man that has the responsibility to attend on election night, and to make sure his or his side’s supporters show up to vote.
In the case of printed ballots and multiprecinct elections this becomes more complicated, but I would still like to find ways to help approximate that process by translating its rationale. Thus, responsibility for securing and maintaining access would be at the most local level possible, and would always be attached to at least one readily identified individual living in that local area. After that comes the responsibility to identify and gather likely or persuadable supporters and office holders and persuade them to turn out and run for or accept the responsibility of public office and responsibility for actions they take while holding such office.
To whatever extent possible, the process should involve men who are long time residents of a local area and whose families are well known in the area, who own property, have wives and children, adequate financial resources to pay a substantial poll tax, know and swear allegiance to the laws everyone must live by, are physically, mentally and morally capable of military or law enforcement service with a minimum threshold of proven experience as well as to being intellectually qualified to be the equivalent of a judge and physically and mentally prepared to personally enforce their judgements and to bear the individual as well as party burden and responsibility for their decisions. The men voting should meet the qualifications of holding office.
Those who don’t qualify to pay into the public treasury should have no say in how it’s proceeds are spent or who makes that decision; those who have no military experience, no risk of having to serve in the case of war, and no children at such risk should have no say at all in decisions that could lead to war or in the election of politicians who might make such decisions. There are ways to apply such principles to whatever election scheme you prefer.
I’ve laid out the case for what I’ve been able thus far to come up with as ideal ways to distill and apply such principles, but we can also debate how they would apply to any present or proposed scheme to whatever extent short of my ideals, as well as why or why or why not my ideals of goals are correct to begin with. That is, we can if anyone wants to not distort what those ideas, goals and proposals are, or what my motivations are in making them.
Walter Ziobro – If voters want to give a zero to every other candidate, then they should be free to do so. That isn’t a problem. It just gives the people who do wish to give points to other candidates the option to do so.
Sorry if too long winded. Attention deficit disorder is widespread, and also why party names are a good idea to have candidates identified with, whether printed next to their names on ballots, printed as the sole option on ballots with the winning party charged to select officeholders, having parties responsible for printing ballots with the names of their candidates (or just their party) and distributing them for voters to turn in, or by determining what groups are entitled to a section of the election hall for their supporters to gather in.
The number of people who want to read, analyze, etc my comments here may be very small, and far fewer still among the public at large. Imagine then just how small a sliver of an overinflated electorate is likely to have the skills, time,interest, and attention level to realistically analyze and remember all those candidates for all those offices and which ones they like better than which other ones and why. It’s a highly unrealistic expectation to have of the real world voting public, regardless of what you think other people should do with their time. It’s equally unrealistic to expect individuals and groups with comparatively less money, name recognition, institutional backing etc to rise above the noise level under attention deficit dumbocracy or for new ideas to incrementally break through that way.
Overly complicated vote counting schemes just cause more confusion and opportunities for manipulation and fraud, just like overly complicated election laws, and more broadly overly complicated laws and regulations and enforcement and adjudication schemes in general. This lets crooked, dishonest, corrupt, underhanded, lying, manipulative individuals and groups find multiple ways to confuse or misdirect more people, game the systems in place to tilt power and money in the direction of themselves and their supporters, make it easier for themselves to evade or misdirect blame for resulting problems, and harder to mobilize effectively to hold them responsible and make changes.
As long as they can bamboozle, mislead and miscount voters, constantly rewrite a confusing morass of laws and regulations which are sporadically and unevenly enforced and impossible for anyone, much less average people, to actually even know and understand, and allow crooks and criminals who are good enough at it to live a profitable and enjoyable life of crime while holding everyone else in fear and locked away from and wary of each other behind closed doors, and create reliable, well paid, secure employment for multiple classes of professional liars and lazy office dwellers kept busy filing out endless useless forms while parasitically living off the productive sectors of the economy and binding innovation under Gordian knots of red tape, and the various priesthoods of information, knowledge, perception, and opinion manipulators to steadily drill away at the foundations of civilization, dumb everyone down, and import a voting base, the chances of elections changing anything meaningful are basically nonexistent, and there’s little opportunity to rise to power or fairly compete in any field without being continuously chiseled by the corrupt cronies and parasites or forced to subsidize or join their various cabals.
The endemic unjustness, inequity, irrationality, dysfunction, and corruption of such a system should by all rights by obvious to everyone. Yet, no one is empowered to realistically change it. Excessive complexity and lack of human scale are key factors in what’s wrong here.
Dumbing everyone down, socially isolating people from each other, cutting the ties of tradition and long standing social bonds of religion, ethnicity, cultural traditions, common language, extended family, various social groups of different kinds which have their functions inadequately supplanted by government bureaucracies, the destruction of long standing connections to places and among people through economic conditions and other means to incentivize many people to move long distances or move around on a frequent basis, the universalization of widespread public and private debt – it’s how the globalist Luciferian elite confuse the herd, continuously manage to get problems caused by government to be “solved” by even more government, disarm and disempower any dissenters, and keep us marching along towards a slaughterhouse for most of us and universal imprisonment and slavery for the survivors.
STILL 0.1 OR LESS PCT OF A PRECINCT POPULATION MAKING THE CHOICE FOR A TYRANT PRECINCT *CAPTAIN* ???
TOTAL 100 WORDS OR LESS IN THE ALL PERFECT LAW(S) IN ALL PRECINCTS ???
NON-M0NARCHS/OLIGARCHS SHOULD LOOK ATTHE FIRST AND SECOND TREATISES BY JOHN LOCKE DEALING WITH THE TYRANT KING JAMES II REGIME IN ENGLAND IN 1680-1688.
LATER- SPIRIT OF THE LAWS 1748 FRENCH BY MONTESQUIEU– 1760 ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
>>> SETUPS FOR USA 4 JULY 1776 DOI, WRITTEN 1776-1789 STATE CONSTS AND WRITTEN 1787 USA CONST.
For a long time, I was opposed to the straight ticket device. Then, I came to the realization that many voters don’t have the time to investigate every candidate, and barely have the time to stand in long lines on election day. So, I relented, and conceded that the straight ticket device should be option for such voters.
The ballot SHOULD be “cluttered” with a lot of choices for folks like me who won’t stuffed into a narrow, partisan straight jacket, and prefer to split my ticket so that no party or person gets so much power that they can override checks and balances. “Gridlock” is to be PREFERRED over letting either the current Demagogues or Repulsives have full control.
Let those in a hurry use their straight ticket devices. In most cases, they tend to cancel each other out. Let those of us who want to hold government back with checks and balances, and minority outcomes have our choices.
AZ, I doubt it would be 100 words or less. A thousand, maybe, if we’re lucky. But then you think Trump is a lot like Hitler, and possibly think you are God. Incidentally, I’ve read Locke and Montesque, among many others. They get some things right and some things wrong, like everyone else.
In particular, why do you insist on answering things which are not even directed at you with idiotic one liner statements or loaded questions, which serve if anything to merely misdirect from unrelated points? I have no interest in your additional input regarding anything I’m trying to understand, as it has already been consistently proven to be worthless or worse. I’m interested if people here who are NOT AZ are interested in discussing a variety of things, only some of which have anything to do with my long term hypothetical solutions. So, kindly, please fuck off.
@Max,
Elections in Louisiana and Washington have party labels as do special elections in Texas, but not party nominations.
When the state recognizes parties as being “qualified”, parties that gain control of the Legislature write laws that are intended to exclude parties as being unqualified. They can’t disqualify candidates but erect procedural barriers to parties.
Those party labels you mention are rather meaningless, kind of like corporate brand labels if they had no intellectual property protection. It’s off topic, but I think that might actually be a good thing, in that I favor a far more locally based economy where intellectual property would not require legal protection; instead, anyone violating it would find himself to be a social and economic pariah, so the idea of actually attempting any such thing would not seriously occur to anyone, and anyone who actually tried would be more likely than not locked up by his own family in a secure portion of their property, attended to by mental health professionals and security personnel and fed like a zoo animal.
Do you believe that you have now addressed the meat of the argument against de jure nonpartisan elections, or against de facto quasi nonpartisan elections? The larger factions have the means for de facto brand protection with meaningless ballot labels, while the smaller factions effectively rely on the state to protect their brands. You can make the case that we would be better off without them being given any such protection, but I’m wondering whether that’s the case you would like to make. That’s why I wanted to hash out the implications that the opponents of such a case make for it. You can disprove that such attachment is accurate, or show why it wouldn’t be a bad thing if it is, or both. I’m open minded enough on that question to entertain such arguments. I note, however, you have pointedly avoided making any of them after quite a few opportunities to do so.