PLACE FAQ: Difference between revisions
→How does PLACE compare to other newly-proposed proportional methods?
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{{POV}}
[[File:PLACE alluvial NC.png|thumb|A "vote flow diagram" showing a hypothetical PLACE election in North Carolina, 2018]]
== Basic questions ==
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=== What does PLACE stand for? ===
[[PLACE]] stands for "Proportional, Locally-Accountable, Candidate Endorsement" voting.
== The problem ==
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=== What hashtag should I use for proportional representation? ===
Unfortunately, the initials "PR" are highly ambiguous; they could refer to Puerto Rico, Public Relations, or a Pull Request (used by programmers to collaboratively fix computer code). But the full words "proportional representation" are too long. Thus, #
=== What does #
Another definition of proportional representation methods is that they are designed to minimize wasted votes. When one party gets a seat proportion that is substantially better or worse than their vote proportion, it must be because they are wasting less or more of their voting power than average. Thus minimizing wasted votes implies getting a proportional result.
In other words: if you want the best chance that your vote will matter and you will be represented, you should be looking for a #
=== Is proportional representation just a theory? ===
Certainly not! Over 80% of OECD countries use some form of #
=== Should advocates of different #
Of course. (Except for closed list, which is strictly worse than open list.)
The various #
== PLACE voting: process (how) ==
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For most voters, the local candidate for their preferred party will be the best option: somebody who will support the party platform on national issues but will also look out for the local community interests on more specific issues. But there are also some voters who identify with a community defined by something besides geography, whether it be ethnicity, some specific political issue, age, etc. The best way to represent such voters is to give them the widest possible choice.
* After ballots are tallied, '''each candidate's votes are given a transfer order''' that begins with that candidate's predeclared (same-party) faction allies, from most to least popular; continues with the rest of their party, from most to least popular; and ends with their predeclared (other-party) coalition allies, from most to least popular.
Transfer orders are used when a candidate is eliminated, and also, if she (he) gets more than an average district's worth of votes, for the extra fraction of each of her votes above that total. Votes retain their original transfer order as they pass from one candidate to another.
This ensures that each district has a meaningful say in electing their own representative, and encourages parties with broader appeal. Votes for tiny fringe parties, or for independents who don't win, won't be wasted because they'll still transfer; but to achieve their goals those parties will have to find ways to form larger coalitions and work with allies, not simply exploit divisive rhetoric. ▼
Why are transfer orders based on a combination of ballot tallies ("most to least popular") and each candidate's predeclared allies and party? Because that enables a simple ballot where the voter has the broadest possible choice, of all candidates electionwide/statewide, without burdening voters with making rankings (that may not end up mattering) of every single one of those candidates.
* '''Candidates are eliminated, and their votes are transferred, until there's one winner per district.''' There are three reasons a candidate may be eliminated:
▲:# He (she) does not have over 25% of the local votes in her own district, or does not have over half the local votes of the frontrunner in her district.<br>This ensures that each district has a meaningful say in electing their own representative, and encourages parties with broader appeal. Votes for tiny fringe parties, or for independents who don't win, won't be wasted because they'll still transfer; but to achieve their goals those parties will have to find ways to form larger coalitions and work with allies, not simply exploit divisive rhetoric.
:# Another candidate in her (his) district has accumulated an average district's worth of votes.<br>This ensures there will be only one winner per district.
:# Comparing each candidate to the top vote-holder in their district, he (she) is the farthest behind. (This rule applies whenever there are no more candidates to eliminate for reasons 1 or 2, and will typically apply multiple times before there's one winner per district left). <br>This keeps the process going, moving votes from weaker candidates to stronger ones, until it finishes.
* Optional: After winners are chosen, '''
Even if your party doesn't win in your district, there will be a representative from your party assigned to cover your district (as long as your party wins at least one seat). This will help voters get used to the fact that, as in any proportional method, voters from outside a district get some say in who will represent that district. Overall, this fact ends up benefiting everyone, because it means wasted votes will be only a tiny remnant, rather than being close to half of all votes as in first past the post.
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Assuming that there is one equal-population [[#What_about_.22district.22.2C_.22riding.22.2C_and_.22constituency.22.3F|district (aka riding or constituency)]] per seat, and that the parties have already nominated candidates by district, PLACE has 3 basic steps:
# '''Before the election, candidates designate''' their "
# '''For the election, voters each pick their favorite candidate''', and winners are chosen as explained below.
# '''After winners are elected, each party assigns their winners ''extra territory'''''. That way, any voter whose vote went (directly or indirectly) to a winning party is a constituent of one specific representative from that party, even if some other party won in their local district.
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::2.1 '''Voters choose their favorite candidate.''' The ballot lists the candidates running locally. There is also some way to vote for any candidate in another district — perhaps as a write-in, or perhaps using an extended ballot which lists all candidates, or perhaps nearby candidates are listed while far-off ones must be written in. Finally, there is an option to simply vote for a party but not for the local candidate; if write-ins are available, this is done by checking a write-in line for a given party but then leaving it blank.
::2.2 '''Ballots are tallied''' and each vote is converted to a transfer order. As stated above, a candidate's faction allies have first priority, then members of the same party, then coalition allies. Within each of these groups priority goes from highest to lowest direct vote total. If all these groups run out, a ballot is exhausted. Votes are never transferred to candidates who have been eliminated or who have already accumulated a full average district worth of votes.
::2.3 '''Votes are transferred until only one winner remains per district.'''
Of the three steps directly above, voters only have to worry about step 2.1. They can leave the details of step 2.3, the transfer process, to the experts. Though those details are a bit more technical, they are basically STV (Single Transferable Voting), a well-known proportional representation method.
:::2.3.1 A "quota" is defined as
:::2.3.2 If a
:::2.3.3 A candidate X can be eliminated for three reasons:
::::2.3.3.1 X has less than 25% of the local votes in her (his) own district, or less than half the local votes of the frontrunner in her district.
::::2.3.3.2 Another candidate in X's district has accumulated an average district's worth of votes. If two or more candidates reach this total simultaneously, whichever originally got fewer local votes is eliminated.
::::2.3.3.3 The difference between the number of votes currently held by X and the candidate Y who currently holds the most votes in X's district, is greater than the similarly-defined difference for any candidate Z?X. This rule applies whenever there are no more candidates to eliminate for reasons 1 or 2, and will typically apply multiple times before there's one winner per district left.
Thus votes will move from weaker candidates to stronger ones until they make up full quotas and the seats fill up.
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=== What would a sample ballot look like? ===
There are at least two possibilities for ballot format. One is that voters would have a choice of ballots: a short version with only local candidates, and one or more possible long versions which cover(s) all candidates
<table border='1px' width='85%'><tr><td>
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<tr>
<td rowspan="3">▢ </td>
<td align="left" colspan="3"><span style="font-size: 1.25rem">'''Other
</tr>
<tr>
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<tr>
<td >▢ </td>
<td align="left" colspan="3"><span style="font-size: 1.25rem">'''Fruitcake'''</span> If he loses, your vote will transfer to a similar candidate, beginning with
</tr>
<tr>
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</table>
</td></tr></table>
[[File:PLACE sample ballot, cute puppy kitten.png|thumb|A PLACE sample ballot for choosing the cutest baby animal]]
=== Did you skip any niggling details in the procedure above? ===
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* Candidates should be relatively free to choose which district to run in. At the very least, you should be able to run in any district if you have lived or work in or "near" it at any time in the last few years. ("Near" can of course be given some suitably-precise legal definition.)
* Parties should still have some sort of democratic (member-driven) process for deciding one candidate per district.
* There should be some '''limit on
All of the above are merely recommendations. More important are the local political laws, traditions, and conditions.
=== Example of a PLACE election ===
See here: https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-example-north-carolina-2018-d8292ef816b4
== What about electoral fusion (one candidate endorsed by multiple parties?) ==
In jurisdictions which allow [[electoral fusion]], a multi-party candidate would appear on the ballot multiple times, once per party that endorses them. All their votes would be counted the same, but they would be transferred according to which ballot line the voter had chosen them under.
Say candidate William Orange was running for both the Yellow and Red parties; and that of the 10,000 votes in his district, he got 2,000 as a Yellow and 1,000 as a Red; and that (for simplicity) he got no votes from outside his district. Thus his 3,000 total direct votes are more than 25% of the district votes, and he is not eliminated up-front. If he was eliminated later in the process, his 2,000 Yellow votes would first go to any Yellow candidate he'd endorsed, then to any other Yellow candidate, then to any non-Yellow candidate he'd endorsed; and similarly for his 1,000 Red votes. If all Red and Yellow candidates were eliminated before his votes had been used up, then it would cease to matter which line his votes had come on, because they'd just transfer to any remaining candidate he'd endorsed. (As always, "any candidate" means one at a time, in descending order of direct votes.)
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* '''Encourages both pre- and post-election coalition-building.''' Because votes can and do transfer between parties, there is an incentive to keep healthy relationships across party lines. Even though larger parties wouldn't have more than a fraction of a seat of leftover votes to pass along, they'd still have that much.
=== What's with the 25% threshold? Why not 40% or 15%? ===
25% leaves room for up to 3 parties per district. (That is, 4 parties can't all have over 25%.) That means that in a two-party district, there will always be room for a new upstart party, so politics won't stagnate. But it also means that there won't be room for too many parties, so smaller fringe parties will have to join into coalitions with broader appeal.
== Arguments against PLACE (and responses) ==
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=== Isn't PLACE too complicated? ===
=== Why should voters be able to affect other districts they don't live in? Why should any district be represented by a winner who didn't get the most votes in that district? ===
The most important thing for you as a voter is to have somebody you helped elect representing you in the legislature. Obviously, in a single-member district, it's impossible for the one winner to be a good representative for all the voters; there will always be at least a substantial minority, and in many cases even a majority, who voted against that representative.
The only way to resolve this is to have more than one seat that each vote might affect. That means that some people's truest representative will not be in their own district. If you don't win locally, then, to help you figure out which representative is responsible for listening to you, the party you voted for will assign one of its winning representatives to cover your district.
=== Doesn't delegation give too much power to candidates? ===
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* The reason you're voting for a candidate is that you think they're the best choice available to represent you in the legislature. To cast that vote, you have to trust them on some level to make many votes in your interest, votes you probably won't even hear about. Why, then, wouldn't you trust their public, predeclared endorsements of other candidates?
* Delegation in PLACE is limited. The candidate you pick
=== Doesn't PLACE put too much emphasis on parties? ===
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=== Doesn't PLACE put too little emphasis on parties? ===
I'd argue that it has more of a happy medium in this regard. For instance, though it's less favorable to parties than FPTP, it's more so than methods like STV.
As discussed above in the question about "healthy politics", PLACE avoids this problem because of the 25% local threshold. Splinter groups without a local base of support don't have to worry about wasting their vote, but they can't actually elect their chosen candidate; they'd have to work through a larger party. This helps ensure some degree of pre-election coalition- and platform-building, so that voters can make a choice between competing visions for the country's future, and not just single-issue parochialism.
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It is not in a party's interest to encourage this kind of voting too much, nor in the voter's interest to vote like this excessively. If taken to an extreme, it could lead to most of the party's candidates being eliminated for failing to meet the 25% threshold.
Out-of-district voting is an important freedom to give to atypical voters, such as voters who want to support a minority ethnic, ideological, or demographic group. But for the typical partisan voter, simply voting for the local party candidate is the best move. Insofar as these typical voters are a majority within each party, out-of-district voting should not be a problem.
=== Isn't there some downside to PLACE that's hard to foresee? ===
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There are a few ways this strategy could fail. If the third party candidates endorsed another candidate Z who's more popular than Y, the transfers would elect Z first and the votes would be soaked up. If in the X/Y district X were highly popular and/or Y unpopular, Y might be eliminated by the 25% rule. And if X got enough cross-district direct votes to reach a quota without vote transfers, X would beat Y no matter how many transfer votes Y got. Still, there is a real possibility this could work.
I see this as a problem, but not an intolerable one. The best way to solve it would be to add a few non-district seats, as in MMP (explained below). Say that a given state had 3 non-district-based seats. In that case, candidates in the same district with winning candidates would not be eliminated until there were 3 districts with 2 winners. The third time that a second (or later) winner was elected from some district, all candidates in districts that had 1 or more winners would be eliminated simultaneously. Even a small proportion (say, 10%) of such MMP-like seats would be sufficient to prevent "targeted knockouts" from becoming a problem. Stopping the first few knockouts would help, but the big difference is that by spoiling the targeting of the later knockouts, it would greatly blunt the effectiveness of the strategy.
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Also note that this strategy means that a third party would forego its ability to precisely pick a representative they ''do'' like in order to knockout one they ''don't'' like. From a social point of view, it seems that that's at least arguably a legitimate use of their voting power.
== Other #
=== How does PLACE compare to single transferable vote (STV) with multimember districts? ===
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Note that the term "ranked choice voting" (RCV) is sometimes used as a catch-all brand for both STV and its single-winner equivalent, IRV. As a voting theorist, I find that term muddies the waters; there are plenty of ranked voting methods, both single- and multi-winner, aside from these two. What's worse, RCV activists often talk as if RCV were a synonym for voting reform as a whole. We should unite to #endFPTP, not try to paint our proposal as the only option.
STV is a #
* PLACE has simpler ballots. Instead of having to rank each candidate, you can just pick one.
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* PLACE is easier and more transparent to tally, because it's "precinct summable". That is, results can be calculated if each voting location counts votes locally and publishes tallies for each candidate and party. STV results cannot be calculated without the full preference order from each individual ballot, so issues with privacy, auditability, and chain of custody are much more difficult.
==== Breadth versus depth of choice ====
To some people, STV seems more attractive because it allows each voter to make their own choices about their preference ranking, instead of delegating some of that power to a voter's chosen candidate and/or other same-party voters. But the fact that voters give more different preference levels in STV-5 (more "depth of choice") obscures the fact that, because of 5-member districts, they have fewer options at each level (less "breadth of choice"). Increasing district size to STV-7 or STV-9 would help with this, at the cost of more complicated, tedious ballots.
It's likely that PLACE's improved "breadth of choice" will outweigh its lower "depth of choice". Here's a wonky math formula to make that argument more precise:
In fact, in STV, almost all ballots end up spending almost all their voting power on just one candidate each. So even though a voter can mark multiple preferences, only one of them ends up mattering. That means that all the work of ranking only ensures that their vote will count for one of their preferred candidates out of the most-viable 6 (the winners plus the most-viable runner-up). We can call that a precision of 6 for the 5/6 of voters who help elect a winner, and of 0 for the 1/6 of voters whose votes end up wasted; an "average precision" of 5.
How does that compare to PLACE in a 20-winner election? About 1/3 of voters will help elect their absolute favorite candidate over the most-viable loser; a precision of 21. About another 1/4 will see their vote transferred to one of their top choice's predesignated "faction allies". Assuming that there are 2 such allies and that all of them are among the voter's own top 5, that's a precision of 21/6. And then all but 5% of the remainder will see their vote transfer to a member of their favorite viable party; with an effective number of parties of 3.5, that's a precision of 3.5 on average. The overall average precision is thus around 9.3, close to twice as much as under STV. Even if you are one of the minority of voters (approximately 25%) who sees your voting precision lowered from 6 to 3.5, that's not a huge decrease.
=== How does PLACE compare to open list proportional methods? ===
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In practice, OLPR usually goes hand-in-hand with a minimum party threshold. For instance, the rule might be that a party with fewer than 5% of the votes gets no seats.
OLPR is a #
* PLACE has greater voter power and fewer partially-wasted votes in choosing an intraparty faction
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In practice, MMP usually goes hand-in-hand with a minimum party threshold. For instance, the rule might be that a party with fewer than 5% of the votes gets no seats.
MMP is a #
* PLACE has greater freedom for voters, because they're not restricted to vote inside their district.
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The theory and practice of designing voting methods has advanced substantially in the last 20 years, and PLACE is just one result of that. The main ideas that have been drawn from other work are:
I've seen various other proposals which I consider to be superior to STV, OLPR, and MMP, such as [http://www.fairvote.ca/ruralurbanproportional/ Rural Urban Proportional]. I can imagine that it might be possible to design something better than PLACE, or something that's just as good but for whatever reason can get more support.
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* STV, as mentioned above, is the basis for the vote transfer process in PLACE.
* The idea of simplifying STV ballots using prepared lists is an old one. Called "Group Voting Tickets" in Australia, this was first proposed in the US around 1890 under the name "[https://archive.org/details/proportionalrepr00berr the Gove system]" by William Gove of Salem, MA. (However, note that PLACE is far better at keeping all candidates individually accountable to voters than either of these prior methods).
* Previous drafts of the same ideas in PLACE went under names including "PAL representation" and "GOLD voting". Note that there is also an old version of PLACE which included a "do not transfer" option on the ballot.
* For comparison, here is a version of [[simplified PLACE]] without endorsements, just parties. This is a good proposal, but compared to PLACE voting it is biased against smaller parties and independent candidates.
* For smaller-scale, nonpartisan elections, there is [[Dual Member PLACE]] or [[PAD voting]].
== Other related reforms ==
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This creates an incentive to politicize rules and suppress the vote. Security against voter fraud is often cited by those wanting restrictive voting rules, but with only a tiny handful of fraud cases for millions of votes, this seems disingenuous.
Those of us who favor #
Good organizations on this issue in the US: [https://www.brennancenter.org/ Brennan Center], [http://www.commoncause.org/ Common Cause].
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=== Single-winner voting methods ===
The problems with FPTP do not apply only to multi-winner legislative races; they are just as bad in single-winner executive races for offices like President, Governor, or Mayor. In those cases, the solution is not #
Another option that gets mentioned for single-winner is IRV (also annoyingly called RCV). This is promoted by the largest US voting reform nonprofit, FairVote. Unfortunately, while they do good work on #
==== Electoral college and national popular vote ====
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=== What are some ways that PLACE could pass? ===
In Canada: If it gets enough vetting from academics prior to the BC #
In the USA: Short version: Attract activists from across the political spectrum, then pass it in a partisan vote by a Democratic congress in around 2021. Democrats could impose it only on states that have been highly gerrymandered through a partisan process; since the impact of this would largely fall on "red" states, this would be relatively politically easy to get Democratic votes for.
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Longer version:
Usually, voting reforms pass through some combination of popular and insider support. For single-winner reforms, which are a direct threat to the two major parties, that usually means a grassroots effort building from locales where there have been a series of high-profile spoiled elections. That's how Bucklin passed in the Progressive era, that's how IRV has notched up successes more recently, and that's the plan for approval voting starting with [[Fargo,
But proportional representation can potentially jump straight to the national level, and thus happen much faster. The key factor would be support from whichever of the two major parties. This is possible because, although in the long term it would break the two-party duopoly, in the short term the benefits to Democrats from fixing the gerrymandering problem exceed the loss of duopoly power. After all, according to Decision Desk HQ, if the House elections happened now are that the Republicans would get 46.2% of the two-party vote, but 52.4% of the seats; so PLACE voting could reasonably accomplish a 6.2% swing towards the Democrats. Even if they also lost 5% to the Greens, they'd still come out ahead. Furthermore, as mentioned above, they could pass it only on states that have been highly gerrymandered through a partisan process; since the impact of this would largely fall on "red" states, this would be relatively politically easy to get Democratic votes for.
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Longer answer: There are solid constitutional arguments that it is. As the preamble to the Fair Representation Act sponsored by Rep Beyer (D-VA) puts it:
(1) the authority granted to Congress under article I, section 4 of the Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power to enact laws governing the time, place, and manner of elections for Members of the House of Representatives; and
Of course, the best constitutional arguments in the world would be worthless if it faced a Supreme Court with 5 judges ready to twist logic to the degree they did in ''Bush v. Gore'' or ''Shelby County''. Still, with an impartial court, this can very much pass constitutional muster.
In fact, because it still has single-member districts, PLACE voting could be implemented at the state level with no changes in federal law, unlike other #
=== How can we convince different specific communities in the USA to support PLACE? ===
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=== Who are you and why should I listen to you? ===
I'm Dr. Jameson Quinn,
But you should listen to me not because of any credentials I have, but because you can tell that I've considered this from many angles, that I'm being reasonable, and that this is a serious proposal. Or if you think I'm wrong somehow, write to me at firstname dot lastname at gmail.
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These three terms are synonyms, used in the US, Canada, and the UK, respectively. I've used "district" because it's actually used in two of those countries (Canada calls the areas for provincial-level elections "legislative districts") and it's annoying to always say all three.
=== What
Version 1.1. The previous version, 1.0, used the Droop quota, not the Hare quota, which made it harder to explain; and did not include the optional rules about how many faction allies a candidate can have or about pre-eliminating candidates with less than half the votes of the local frontrunner.
[[Category:Proportional voting methods]]
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