Steering Council Election Methods (Approval Voting)

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I’m not :wink:. The election method used can have profound effects on the outcome. It’s at least as important as deciding on who can vote.

Yes, any sane election method will elect some portion of those who get the most votes. It’s what happens to the rest of the positions that’s at issue. As I’ve illustrated several times already with concrete examples, pure approval voting in a multi-winner election can easily result in all positions being filled by the slimmest of majorities, leaving the slimmest of just-barely minorities with no winners at all. Pure approval voting was not designed for multi-winner elections; it was designed to pick a (one) winner.

According to me, since removing the limit on the number of approvals a ballot can make, we’re doing the best that can be done with pure approval voting.

For minorities to get a chance of winning some positions too, there are two approaches:

  1. Use a scheme that gives ballots less weight the more that ballot’s approvals have already won positions. I have(*) 4 specific ways to do that I would like to try, but - alas - it doesn’t appear possible to get unencrypted, anonymized ballots back from our voting software (the Helios service). Without real-world PSF ballots to use as input, there’s just no way to guess the real-world PSF election outcomes such methods would yield. Knowing the total number of approvals each candidate gets is useless for this - it’s how they’re distributed across ballots that matters.

  2. As has already been suggested elsewhere, and more than once, impose minimum requirements on how many winners must be picked from various identifiable groups

#2 is a rat’s nest and a potential political firestorm. For example, there are quite possibly more “identifiable groups” who can make a case for being “under-represented” than there are SC positions to fill.

(*) By “I have” I mean I have code ready to run. I did not invent the methods - they were taken from an academic paper. In the necessarily invented “lopsided” examples I’ve tried them on, they all deliver outcomes that I think almost everyone would consider to be “more fair” than the pure-approval multi-winner outcomes.

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