Fundraiser Update

Lots of exciting news for the ongoing Approval Voting Video Fundraiser! The campaign has surpassed $5,000, and is now #1 for non-profits, #1 in the politics category, and #1 in San Francisco. Out of over 4,000 active campaigns on Indiegogo, we're in the top 10, and rapidly approaching the top 5.

With just a little more help from you, we can keep moving up, and reach our goal. Toward that end, this has been declared "$1 weekend," and we're pushing to get people—new funders as well as people who have already given—to donate just $1. So if you're reading this, please, head over there now, and give us a buck.

Participation is wonderful, but if you're in it for the perks, I have some news for you, too. First, you can now earn yourself some free books via referrals. Create an account at Indiegogo, and when you use the social sharing links on the project page, click-throughs get credited to you. Second, since the $500 level and its "special mention" perk have sold out (wow!) so quickly, three more "special mentions" have been put up as prizes, at the anti-discounted rate of $625. So if you, or your organization, want to see their name on this project, you can still do that.

Finally, Indiegogo is making the Approval Voting Video project its Twitter Campaign of the Day this coming Wednesday. Follow @indiegogo or @electionscience (or me @mudlock) and let all your friends know about this project by retweeting us this Wednesday.

Thanks for all your help so far. Spread the word, help us reach our goal, make this video, and get the word out about the dangers of plurality and the advantages of approval voting.

Approval Voting Fundraiser

This last weekend, the Center for Election Science—the world's largest (only?) approval voting advocacy group—launched a fundraiser through Indiegogo. The goal is to raise $12,375 (a very precise amount; don't you love an organization run by math geeks?) in order to have a professional, high-quality video produced about the advantages of approval voting, which will then be entered in the MacArthur Foundation's Looking@Democracy contest. Or, in short, please watch this video for a fundraiser for a video for a fundraiser.

There are a number of perks available for different funding levels. I put in $100 in order to get a signed copy of Gaming the Vote, the book that first convinced me of the benefits of approval voting. I must have bought the book three or four times by now, but I keep giving my copies away to friends and local politicians. I'll definitely be keeping this one though!

Even if you can only contribute $1, it would be warmly welcomed, and it would mean a lot to me, personally. I've been at this for four years now (some CES supporters have been working towards this much longer!) and although one little video may not seem like much, it marks the difference between being just a bunch of people complaining about politics on the internet, and being real advocates for change. Help us do something important.

Maybe you haven't heard the advantages of approval voting, or maybe you could use a recap. Approval voting:

• Always lets you vote for your favorite
• Never has spoilers
• Is simpler than any rank-based voting method
• Encourages consensus winners
• Lets 3rd parties earn their true level of support

We have real-world and theory-backed evidence to support all of these claims. We just need a little bit of help from you to get the word out.

Approval Voting Bill in Colorado

A bill to allow approval voting in local elections has been introduced in the Colorado senate (SB13-065) If you're a Colorado resident, now is the time to contact your senator, especially if they're on the "State, Veterans, & Military Affairs" committee. I'll keep you updated for how this proceeds.

"Best Visual Effects" To Be Determined by Re-weighted Range Voting

We've occasionally talked about the voting procedures of the Academy Awards for Best Picture. In short, they recently changed to using instant runoff voting, and I think that was a pretty poor choice; they should use range (AKA score) voting. So imagine my delight when it was pointed out to me that the nominees for this year's award for best visual effects will be determined by re-weighted range voting! (Rule 7b.)

I'm not entirely sure that a method of proportional representation in the best way to pick nominees for a single-winner election, but this is sill fantastic news. I wish I knew how the idea of RRV made its way into Hollywood, but regardless of how it happened, I'm ecstatic that it has.

Re-weighted Range Voting uses the same ballot as normal range voting, namely, each voter can give each candidate any score within a given range. The first winner is determined the same as well, it's simply the candidate with the highest score. The next step—and the way in which the method becomes proportional—is that each voter who voted for the winner has all of the scores on their ballot re-weighted downward, based on how highly they scored the winner. If you gave the winner the maximum score, the rest of your ballot's weight is cut in half, and the lower the score you gave them, the more strength your ballot retains. And then the second winner is whichever has the highest re-weighted score. Each additional winner further re-weights every ballot (if you gave the maximum score to the first two winners, the rest of your ballot is cut to a third, and so on) so that each time a voter gets their way, they have less say on the following rounds.

RRV is, of course, perfectly compatible with an approval-style ballot, since approval is equivalent to range, with a "range" of just 0 and 1. Re-weighted approval could therefore be a very easy and effective way to implement proportional representation.

Pendulum Or Plumb?

An engineer, a mechanic, and a statistician go on an African hunting safari. They spot a lion in the distance, and the engineer aims, and fires... but misses five feet to the left. The mechanic scoffs, takes aim, and fires... but misses five feet to the right. So the statistician jumps up and shouts "We got 'em!"

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Since about WWII, congressional polarization has steadily increased. Over the last election cycle we've seen another wave of incumbent moderates forced from office, either by successful primary challenges (e.g. Richard Lugar), or via replacement with a more partisan candidate that's more in-line with the area's political leanings (e.g. Scott Brown or Ben Nelson). As a result, this month's election continues that trend and makes the US Congress yet more polarized than it already was.

With moderation virtually impossible to find in any one member of congress, many Americans have resigned themselves to the hope that, while political power will swing like a pendulum between too-far-left and too-far-right, the results will average out to be somewhere in the middle. (Or worse, they've resigned themselves to the despair that politics has become hopelessly and irrevocably polarized.)

But what if there's a better way? Plurality voting (as well as instant runoff voting) suffers from a problem known as "center squeeze", where if three candidates are running for office, the one in the center is at a significant disadvantage. And so overtime, despite the honest intentions of every voter, the political center is emptied of elected representation. But if we use a voting method that does not suffer from "center squeeze", such as approval voting, then we would see the opposite effect: Over time, more members of congress would be found in the center.

Alternative Voting Methods Experiment by OWS

The Political and Electoral Reform working group, a part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, performed an exit-poll survey experiment on alternative voting methods. It was conducted at a very Democratic-leaning precinct, but the results are still quite informative. By all three methods tested (approval, score, and instant runoff voting), the Green party won, and only under IRV did the Democrats even come in second. In the actual election, the precinct went heavily to the Democrats, of course.

Four More Years

My first entry to this blog was four years ago today, the day after the election, arguing that Mike Huckabee may have been a spoiler for Mitt Romney in the 2008 Republican primary election. Back then I was arguing in favor of Condorcet ranked pairs. It wouldn't be until January, after reading Gaming the Vote, that I would jump away from ranked methods entirely to support evaluative methods like approval voting. I have been constant on some things though; I've always been against IRV. (Mostly.)

Support for third-parties has also been a constant undercurrent here. Mostly, I think, because third-party supporters are the ones with the most to gain from, and therefore the most likely to listen to, what I have to say. But be sure to read up on your history, and to disabuse yourself of spurious arguments, if you want to be ready for what comes next.

I try to always argue from a logical—rather than emotional—perspective, but I find I sometimes have to tap into a bit of esoterically academic minutia. Still, I try my best to keep my points accessible, and I hope the steady gain in my audience over these four years means I've been successful on both fronts.

Thank you for reading. Here's to four more years!