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[Discussion] Voting ballot example

There has been a proposal for not using replies for voting.

This is cleaner and doesn't expose everyone's votes to anyone reading the thread.

I have a notion of how this would look, so I'm creating this discussion and the replies for each option as an example. Please discuss or upvote any of the options I wrote below, and we can all see how this would look.

Should registration of this instance be:

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  • Perhaps add explainer:
    This poll is based on the preceeding discussion: [link]. Please make yourself familiar with the discussion before voting.
    There is a choice between several options.
    Upvote those options you would agree with, downvote those you would not agree with.

    (comment to abstain? I know this could be abused. ...)

    Add an option: "Do not change the current mode of registration."

    ... and i like to edit: Some information on how the final choice will be made may also be helpful (this could differ by subject): "The option on which the ratio of upvotes [(sum-of-votes -- downvotes) / sum-of-votes] exceeds that of all others by at least 1.5 : 1 will be implemented; should none meet that target no change will be made."

    • I like some of those suggestions. However, I don't think down voting or abstaining should be supported. You either support an option by up voting or you take no action.

      Approval voting systems have well studied behaviors and we should not deviate from that without a compelling reason.

      Every approval / upvote is a distinct user endorsement for an option. The option with the most users endorsing it should be selected when that number exceeds 51% of the active users set we decide on.

      • That could be another way to gauge the outcome. I just suggested to get into account the actual disapproval also (if we were that advanced, i'd wish we could have weighted disapproval voting anyway, but i can't hope that people understand the advantages of that). Why would my way of counting the approval ratio rather than approval-only be of any disadvantage? I mean, that way it would include the total number of participants as well, and an approval ratio would be a more robust decision-maker than just a fixed goal of absolute agreement. And why should i not want to improve on stuff? :-)

        But anyway, this was meant to suggest how to improve the ballot itself (after all, that's the topic of the discussion here). So aside from how ever votes are to be counted, i suggest to include all that information in the ballot.

        • Why would my way of counting the approval ratio rather than approval-only be of any disadvantage?

          That's just how voting systems work. Even seemingly insignificant changes to the algorithm can have outsized impacts on how well it performs.

          Plurality versus Approval is a specific example of this. Just changing "choose one" to "choose as many as you approve of" significantly impacts the amount of data that's captured and often the outcome because of the effects on voters' behaviors.

          I liked the suggestion of more information. When we have it all figured out those details should be included as you suggested.

          • Thanks for the recognition!

            It is all true that different ways of evaluation will lead to different results. That can be understood though, and i think that i can wrap my mind around the maths of it (yet perhaps not everyone could, no offence intended). Some ways are more appropriate in certain context, some are inherently unfair, etc. -- My suggestion should have been meant towards more accuracy ...

            But maybe let's forget about this entirely, and look here: Ranked Choice Voting https://sh.itjust.works/post/311690

            • RCV/IRV has been a scam for more than a century. Please look into how that was invented and how it actually performed. More than half the places that tried it actually removed it.

              I don't know why people keep being fooled by complexity, but they do.

              • ... aha ... now slowly i get some dissonance. You just advertised a system that doesn't count dissenting votes, therefore making it impossible to find the real acceptance of some choice. I may look into how Ranked Choice was "invented" (hey, anyone could come up with such a thing). But please stop to belittle people just because you seem to not grasp some modest complexity.
                I can see for example, that not being able to rank options equally, will give an advantage to that which is listed first on the ballot. That is easy to see for me. My mind makes pictures.

                • If you like pictures, there is a visualization of the RCV/IRV flaws.

                  https://fosstodon.org/users/tcely/statuses/110291193062264304

                  • If you would want to be cooperative then you would have followed my suggestion and we would maybe have a fruitful pondering. Good day.

                • You just advertised a system that doesn’t count dissenting votes, therefore making it impossible to find the real acceptance of some choice.

                  Likewise, RCV doesn't count all of the voter's rankings, making it impossible to find the true preferred candidate from the published election results.

                  • This is an old thread, so it would not really make sense to repeat all that i have posted later. In short, yes if you take the counting methods that throw out and re-arrange rankings just for the sake of getting a number above 50 "percent", as in "automated run-off". I didn't even think that someone would do such a thing because of course that would skew the result. Until i saw some (US-american what else) how RCV is ostensibly bad, which were made in a very deceptive way. Ranked Choice is a voting method, not the method in which votes are counted!
                    This comes from a country that elieves there are to be always only two candidates -- which isn't true in real-world situations. I suggested to count all the rankings, and to accept that there might be a minority-winner.

26 comments