Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] [Ag-buergerbeteiligung] Score Voting

["Christoph \"Pluto\" Puppe" <piraten AT stderr.de>]

Hi Clay,

I cc on my lists, you on yours, works :) My reply keeps the full text
of your answer.

2012/5/12 Clay Shentrup <clay AT electology.org>
>
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Christoph "Pluto" Puppe 
> <piraten AT stderr.de> wrote:

>> For the next party convention, I don't think I'm for one are not inclined 
>> to format this voting scheme into a motion. As it is complex to count. We 
>> believe in human readable and controllable voting methods.
>
>
> We do too. We believe Score Voting is pretty easy to manually count. 
> Australia and Ireland hand counted their (MUCH more complicated) STV system 
> since the early 1900's, before any calculators or computers. Here's an 
> excerpt from ScoreVoting.net/Complexity.html
>
> Australia and Ireland have both been successfully using STV voting since 
> the 1910s and 1920s, and Australia for their elections for senators 
> switched to reweighted STV in 1949 – which Ireland had been using all along.
>
> This was before the days of calculators and computers. In Australia, voting 
> is compulsory (you get fined if you do not vote) and a full rank ordering 
> of all the candidates is required on each ballot. That is harder for voters 
> than score voting.
>
> Then, after the votes have been collected, the counting proceeds. In 
> reweighted STV, we first count all the top-rank votes, then find the 
> candidate with the fewest and eliminate him. Steps of this nature (and 
> another nature – declaring "winners" those candidates with above the "Droop 
> quota" of top-rank votes) are repeated – and between these steps each vote 
> is reweighted depending on how it voted for previous winners. Each cycle we 
> redo the whole process with all the previous winner and loser candidates 
> eliminated from all votes. In one Australian election there were 72 
> candidates and hence there were 71 such cycles to be performed, and each 
> voter had to rank all 72 candidates in order.
>
> That is a pretty complicated process. What really makes it tricky is that 
> each vote has its own individual weight, which keeps changing throughout 
> the process according to a formula involving multiplication, subtraction, 
> division, and truncation to integers, and depending on the individual 
> characteristics of that vote and what the set of previous winners is.
>
> And all this has been going on, successfully, since the 1920s in the days 
> before without calculators or computers, in Ireland and Australia.
>
> So I definitely appreciate your concern about keeping things simple. But I 
> also think it's not at all unrealistic to count Score Voting ballots by 
> hand.

But still ... we will be very hard pressed for time on the party
gathering. So every minute the counting takes longer is a minute too
long, I'd think.

>> All members of the party get to vote on posts and posters, can hand out +5 
>> to -5 points and do so as often as they wish.
>
>
> Wow, yes, that's Score Voting! Great.
>
> This is a relatively small issue, but we recommend zero-based scales, like 
> 0-10 or 0-9 or 0-99.
> http://ScoreVoting.net/Why99.html

OK, I see the argument. True enough for candidate/motion votings. This
bulletinboard / mailinglist voting is in this different, as teh
current implementation adds the points indefinitly. Both in time and
range. So for this system to have any meaning at all, subtraction of a
Reputation is necessary.

But ... I'm not too happy with the current implementation. This beeing
one of the main concerns. Lacking the time and ressources to redo
everything from scratch .. it comes down to the options of using the
COTS or doing it not. One of the AG (working comites)
 is designing a tool for structured and tool based means to discuss,
define, refine and vote. It's in a very early stage right now, and
this topic is about the last stage of the process.

Did you get check out liquidfeedback as a tool? This we have and use already.

>> Beeing able to score vote on a motion is definitely a thought worth to be 
>> discussed.
>
>
> We have proposed this idea called "Scored Variants" or "Scored 
> Alternatives". Every proposal starts out with two options — the new text, 
> along with the status quo. By default, everyone's score for the status quo 
> is maximum, and for the new option it's a minimum score. People can add 
> additional options — say you want to modify the proposal somehow. The first 
> option to have a higher score than the status quo option becomes "law". But 
> you can always add new variants to it, and people can vote at any time to 
> change it again.

Especially the "options become votable in the same vote" thing is
sexy. Liquid feedback implements this rather similar, but they are
handled as alternatives, who get to go the whole way on their own.

http://liquidfeedback.org/open-source/projekt/

> I'm currently writing a voting app in the Ruby on Rails framework, which 
> eventually will support this system. It certainly needs to have some 
> details figured out. But I think it's an interesting approach. It moves 
> away from Yes/No binary verdicts, to a more nuanced analysis of some 
> different compromises. The thing is, you don't want to have too many 
> options for people to make sense of. So there's the question of how to 
> limit choices without censorship. All very hard problems as I'm sure you 
> know.

please keep me posted about your progress!

>> Sometimes a persons approval or disapproval is not 100%. So to able to 
>> give 7 out of 10 points and then ... good question ... there need to be a 
>> threshold, when the motion is accepted.
>
>
> Right. That's why our scheme works the way it does. The motion is accepted 
> if it has a higher score than the status quo option. Simple enough. :)
>
>> What would you think about this idea: given now a majority of yes votes is 
>> needed. This would translate into more than 50% of all possible point are 
>> scored?
>
>
> I don't like hard quorums like that. We used to have a hard quorum for 
> doing "safe" average-based Score Voting (instead of sum-based). But we 
> improved it by stealing an idea from IMDB.com, which was actually quite 
> mathematically savvy.
> http://ScoreVoting.net/BetterQuorum.html

Failed to understand this :) Do you say, the no opinion is not
counted? Can't imagine, as this would be rather undemocratinc,
wouldn't it?

> Pleasure chatting with you!

Same :)

--
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