The Libertarian Party is holding a national convention in Columbus, Ohio. The body just voted to use Approval Voting for election of party officers.
The Libertarian Party is holding a national convention in Columbus, Ohio. The body just voted to use Approval Voting for election of party officers.
Very awesome. More parties should take notice.
App.V. is an EMERGENCY fix — pending Condorcet Head to Head math.
P.R. for legislative body elections.
Approval voting is the least expensive, easiest method to select a single winner from multiple candidates…
Congratulations to Libertarian party for adopting this alternative voting method which, if applied to state and national elections, actually could help us avoid the types of issues we’ve had in the recent past…
This is a big mistake. Approval Voting gives the largest majority a super-majority. All single-winner elections are not good. Too bad the LP doesn’t have anyone who understands pure proportional representation. This is a travesty.
Do you want fair elections and pure proportional representation (PR)? Try the Sainte-Lague parliament seat distribution system, ranked choice voting (RCV), Hagnebach-Bischoff method in multi-winner districts of two or more only.
The 9th USA Parliament has been using it for 19 consecutive years and it works great!
http://www.usparliament.org
Why do you THINK they called it Google?
I am a lifetime LP member, but I vowed not to give the party another penny or second of my time until they endorse Approval Voting. Using AV to elect party officers is a small step on the long road to relevance.
Personally I prefer RCV but note that this is for the election of Party officers which are single seat elections. PR does not apply. It is hard to conduct an RCV election within the time constraints of a convention. Approval Voting is easier to count and it’s at least better that first-past-the-post.
James Ogle,
I agree that proportional representation would have been better, but this is certainly an improvement over the system they had. I explain why here:
http://clayshentrup.blogspot.com/2014/06/approval-voting-is-better-than.html
Regarding the proportional methods you mention, “ranked choice voting (RCV)” is a neologism for Instant Runoff Voting, which is NOT a proportional voting method. IRV is specifically the single-winner form of Single Transferable Vote. The Proportional Approval Voting system I mention in my blog post has significant advantages over STV however.
June Genius,
Approval Voting is radically superior to Instant Runoff Voting (presumably what you mean by “RCV”).
http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
IRV is basically the worst of the five commonly discussed alternative voting methods, as you can see in this graph of Bayesian Regret performance from William Poundstone’s book _Gaming the Vote_.
http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Clay Shentrup
Co-founder, The Center for Election Science
It is not at all clear that Condorcet is better than Approval Voting. They perform quite similarly:
http://ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
But given certain strategic behaviors, it’s actually possible for Approval Voting to be a better Condorcet method than real Condorcet methods:
http://ScoreVoting.net/AppCW.html
http://ScoreVoting.net/CondBurial.html
https://www.lp.org/bylaws
Art. 7 Natcom officers
Art. 8 Natcom — part at large, part gerrymander.
Standard clubby TYRANT officers having both legislative and executive powers since 1971 — early bylaws were a copy of the Elephant national bylaws.
Conv. Rule 8 — was IRV. Changed to App.V. — i.e. ONE vote for each new officers.
Should be MAIL ballots for ALL members in any group — to END the rule of the clubby types with the time and money to go to clubby conventions.
—–
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
I want to acknowledge and congratulate James Ogle for making rational and informative posts about voting systems and not simply discussing the USA Parliament stuff. Good work, James! People will listen to you if you stay on topic.
June Genius,
Approval Voting is radically superior to Instant Runoff Voting (presumably what you mean by “RCV”).
http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
IRV is basically the worst of the five commonly discussed alternative voting methods, as you can see in this graph of Bayesian Regret performance from William Poundstone’s book _Gaming the Vote_.
ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Clay Shentrup
Co-founder, The Center for Election Science
It is not at all clear that Condorcet is better than Approval Voting. They perform quite similarly:
ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
But given certain strategic behaviors, it’s actually possible for Approval Voting to be a better Condorcet method than real Condorcet methods:
ScoreVoting.net/AppCW.html
ScoreVoting.net/CondBurial.html
What is “Approval” voting? I thought the Libertarian Party used “Instant Run-Off” (IRV) voting.
App.V. = Vote for 1 or more.
The highest wins.
Condorcet in France in the 1780s (repeat 1780s) noted that a third choice can beat each of 2 existing choices – head to head.
i.e. A > B
there can be choice C — such that
C > A and C > B separately.
In larger elections, a test winner may both win and lose in some head to head combinations — thus a need for a tiebreaker such as App.V.
— i.e. Have BOTH Number Votes (Relative support) and YES/NO votes (Absolute support).
John McCready,
Instant Runoff Voting, or IRV for short, is a ranked voting system that eliminates candidates in successive rounds. It is one of the more complex voting systems, and can do some very strange things, like punishing you for ranking your favorite candidate in 1st place. E.g.
http://www.electology.org/core-support
Approval Voting is much simpler, because it uses an ordinary non-ranked ballot. You just vote for as many candidates as you want to, and the candidate with the most votes still wins. It satisfies the Favorite Betrayal Criterion, which means it cannot possibly hurt you to vote for your favorite candidate.
Here’s run-down of the numerous advantages of Approval Voting over IRV.
http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
John McCready,
Instant Runoff Voting, or IRV for short, is a ranked voting system that eliminates candidates in successive rounds. It is one of the more complex voting systems, and can do some very strange things, like punishing you for ranking your favorite candidate in 1st place. E.g.
http://www.electology.org/core-support
Approval Voting is much simpler, because it uses an ordinary non-ranked ballot. You just vote for as many candidates as you want to, and the candidate with the most votes still wins. It satisfies the Favorite Betrayal Criterion, which means it cannot possibly hurt you to vote for your favorite candidate.
Here’s run-down of the numerous advantages of Approval Voting over IRV.
http://www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv
Apparently the bylaws require that they use the same system for the at-large races and the single-winner races. In that case, it would be interesting for them to consider *proportional* Approval Voting, which can be easily tabulated in a spreadsheet, like I demonstrate here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jS7b-0PV9E
This would create more precedent for this proportional voting system, and I think Libertarians would agree that a proportional system is going to be the strongest antidote to two-party duopoly. With PR, Libertarians would presumably hold at least 10% of the seats in Congress.
TWO tests regarding voting-
Relative (Number Votes – rank order votes)
Absolute (YES/NO).
Approval Voting fails the Relative test.
IRV fails both the Relative test (by ignoring 2nd and later choices) and the Absolute test (i.e. Some or even ALL of the choices might be UN-acceptable).
It’s not clear to me that the LP really did use Approval Voting. The votes for each candidate all add up to 100%
http://hammeroftruth.com/2014/nicholas-sarwark-elected-to-lead-libertarian-party/
The LP’s bylaws:
https://www.lp.org/bylaws
allow for use of alternative “preferential” systems, but only if approved for the special convention procedures, and I don’t see AV mentioned.
EXACTLY what in Hell happened at the LP National Convention ???
Bylaws and/or Convention Rules CHANGED ???
If YES, then what was/is the EXACT language involved ???
ALL the world wants/needs to know N-O-W — for the mere survival of Western Civilization.
The officers were not elected using Approval Voting. It was just the at-large and Judicial Committee.