Sorry to not be concrete in this suggestion, but point is:

Avoid anyone thinking that allowing more than 3 (or even all) candidates to get ranked doesn't solve any of IRV's issues. It should be a side note that IRV calculation and voting is screwy enough to lead to this limitation being common.

This is an implementation detail that is insightful but is not at the heart of the issues.

The simplest and clearest way to describe IRV's issues is how you can't get your 2nd choice (or other later choices) counted if they get eliminated before your 1st choice gets eliminated. Too much of http://www.equal.vote/srvvsirv still can be read as implying that you will move to your 2nd choice if you marked one. There needs to be an earlier section making more absolutely clear that the wrong order of IRV elimination means your 2nd choice never counts.

the lack of https is bad technically and looks bad (I actually just got an email from someone who brought this up themselves) to anyone who looks for signals like that about whether a site is trustworthy and professional quality etc.

Get certs and make the site https ASAP

Upon more reflection, I think it may be a better strategy to switch from "no, IRV is shitty! We need Score Runoff" to "Yeah! Rank Choice! Instant Runoff! That's the best. And we're excited to announce we've worked out a tweak to IRV that makes it much better, so we should specify this improved version!"

The more I've considered lessons from political histories that I have connection to, the more I realize that co-opting a term and movement is more effective than setting up as an opposition movement.

I imagine reframing everything to say effectively, "instant runoff is a great concept, the only question is how to choose who gets to the runoff." And we need to give a name to the screwed up multi-round version. Maybe call it "multi-round last-place dropping" or something like that. We can describe how stupid and convoluted that is and how it introduces serious pathologies. Then say, "if we just use a score-style ballot, we can do the instant runoff in a single round, and it's easier to audit, to understand, and has far fewer problems."

Then, we should have a side-by-side chart of "2 ways to do instant runoff" with "multi-round last-place dropping (old way)" versus "score runoff (new way)".

The chart would emphasize that Score Runoff performs better per all the math and the criteria that matter, show the differences in what spoils a single ballot, etc.

In the end, we should be saying, "this is the cutting-edge best way to do rank-choice and instant-runoff" and then when people bring up IRV, instead of saying "IRV is awful…" we say, "Yeah, I'm a supporter of IRV / RCV, but we do need to make sure we use Score Runoff as the way to do the instant-runoff, that's the best FORM of IRV!"

If there's agreement on this, I propose pushing ahead ASAP and then making big announcement and working to change the way everything is talked about. Validate everyone's wishes and offer this gift of even better version rather than attack their mediocre starting point.

(For reference, one of the biggest examples here is how the term "Open Source" took over from "Free Software" and "Software Freedom" and how the latter failed big-time by setting up as an opposing movement rejecting the "Open Source" movement instead of co-opting and saying "yes, Open Source is what we need, and it's about freedom and empowerment!")

Great step getting stuff up. I may be able to do this, but whoever gets to it first:

Would be far better for several reasons but mostly for maximizing contributions to not use proprietary file formats. Instead of iWork .pages and .numbers, it would be best to use Open Document Format for these. Rich-text is a proprietary Microsoft format, and license files, especially here, should be just plain text, probably Markdown so GitHub will display it nicely.

PDF is fine.

.sketch files should be exported to SVG. png and jpg are fine, but we do want the vector source files for all images when available.

xlsx file should be exported to open document format

For the site, it's really odd that html files are .txt — the files seem fine, but the names should be changed to .html (is .txt filename something Nation Builder requires or something?)

Proportional Representation

Proportional Score Runoff, (SRV-PR) is a voting method that can elect multiple candidates in elections where more than one seat is available.

SRV-PR, like normal Score Runoff, uses a score ballot, where the voter can assign a score to each candidate, we use 0-9 in this example:

• Each voter fills out their ballot as usual, giving the highest score to their favorite and so on. The scores are totaled and the two candidates with the highest scores advance to a runoff. Whichever you ranked higher gets your full vote in the runoff. Just like in single winner Score Runoff Voting. The first winner has been elected!

• To find the next winner, the remaining candidates scores are counted again with one change. If your favorite won the last round, your remaining scores are all divided in half. (If my second favorite had an 8 then it would be counted as a 4 in the second round.) The two candidates with the highest scores advance to a runoff. Whichever you ranked higher gets your full vote in the runoff.

• To find the third winner, the remaining candidates scores are counted again. Every time your favorite wins a round your remaining scores are all divided in half again. (If my third favorite also had an 8 it would be now be counted as a 2.) The two candidates with the highest scores advance to a runoff. Whichever you ranked higher gets your full vote in the runoff.

• This process continues until enough candidate are elected to fill all the available seats.

Weakening the ballots of voters who have already won allows minority voters to elect a winner as well if they have sizeable proportion of the voting block. Minority groups will be better represented by the group of elected politicians. The runoff ensures that those minority candidates sill have wide support and works to prevent divisive extremist candidates from getting elected. This creates a legislative body that better represents all the voters as opposed to group that only represents the majority.

Advantages over other forms of Proportional Representation:

• The nature of the scored ballot and the election process encourages candidates to reach out to all voters, not just their core and it also keeps them accountable to all voters if the want to seek re-election.
• SRV-PR is non-partisan. You don't just vote the party line, you actually choose which individual candidates you like and evaluate them based on whatever criteria is most important to you.
• Conventional Proportional Representation has been linked to helping extremest factions come to power in the past, from the NAZI's in Germany to the Facists in Italy. The runoff stage helps eliminate small but passionate minorities that antagonize the rest of the voters while still giving other minorities a voice.
• SRV-PR is less likely to elect polarized groups of candidates that can't agree on anything and can't get anything done. This is because of the incentive given by scored ballots to maintain approval from as wide a group of voters as possible.

Disadvantages of SRV-PR:

• Votes must be sent to a central location before they can be counted. This is true of all existing Proportional Representation systems.
• Hasn't been tested in a real world election.
• Elected officials aren't tied to specific districts. This can decrease accountability to local areas. This is true of all existing Proportional Representation systems.
• SRV-PR is fairly complicated, though less so than other forms of PR with the exception of Re-weighted Range Voting.

Credits: Mark Frohnmayer, Seth Woolley, and Sara Wolf's late night musings -- based almost entirely on re-weighted range voting.

Because it uses both preference order and a notion of how much the voter approves of each candidate, SRV is both easier to tabulate and results in a more representative outcome than Instant Runoff Voting, another Ranked Choice system currently being considered for adoption in Oregon.

That's a really long sentence. It could be broken up easily and improved. A suggested alternative:

SRV uses both preference order and a score of each candidate. Candidates may be scored equally when voters have no preference between two options. Compared with Instant Runoff Voting (another Ranked Choice system currently being considered for adoption in Oregon), SRV elections are easier to tabulate and give results that better represent voters' wishes.

I think one of the main knee-jerk responses to star voting are that people have different ideas of what 5-stars means or 4-stars. We need a really good page on equal.vote that not only explains that zero-support to max-support is fine, universal, and relative to the pool of candidates in an election.

The page should include educational suggestions & plans in order to convince readers that we will succeed at getting across this interpretation. So, we need to make it clear that we're not relying on people necessarily getting this right immediately, but that we have specifically worked out how to make sure everyone gets it.

We should even acknowledge that the relative nature does mean that adding extreme candidates (or removing them) can cause a shift in the relative meaning of the scores, and that this is just an unfortunate fact but one that doesn't undermine Star voting's advantages.

Again, the point is to be a page to send to those people who say "scoring doesn't work, we don't agree about what 5-stars mean, cultural differences etc"

Homepage: "Why? Our current way of voting, known as Plurality Voting, limits us to picking a single favorite in each election, so whenever there are more than two options, the more similar ones split supporters' votes, giving more weight to those of us who prefer fewer candidates. Because of this fundamental inequality, we are encouraged not to “waste our vote” on a long shot “spoiler” candidate we might really like. Instead, to prevent our worst option from winning, we are compelled to vote for the “lesser evil” - the more tolerable of the two candidates most beholden to well-funded and partisan special interests." This is pretty good but could be clearer and more convincing.

Suggestion: "Why? Our current way of voting, known as Plurality Voting, limits us to picking a single favorite in each election. This works okay if there is only one red and one blue candidate but if there are multiple options, the similar candidates risk splitting their supporters' votes between them, throwing the election entirely! To avoid this dangerous "spoiler effect," we are compelled to abandon our favorite and vote for the “lesser evil” - the candidate from our side of the aisle that the establishment and the media have picked out as being more electable.

Plurality voting puts America in a two party stranglehold where both parties are beholden to well-funded special interests. Even worse, because we aren't free to vote for who we actually prefer it's not actually a Democracy.

© 2016 Equal Vote Coalition, CC BY 4.0 International

with icon from https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/

CC-BY is a fully acceptable and free license that makes dissemination easy. I happen to prefer CC BY-SA though because it requires that when other people make adaptations or republish the work, they keep the license terms free for everyone. I suppose there's a slim downside of some less sharing, but I'm not sure that's as much of a concern as other people stripping away the license. Thoughts?

From the homepage: I like this part a lot. Minor changes!
SUGGESTION: The Solution: One Fair Election

What if we could have a single inclusive election that provides us all an equal say, accurately reflects of the will of the people, is simple for voters and elections officials to understand and use, and allows us to expressively share our honest opinions about each candidate instead of always having to strategically choose the lesser evil?

Until recently, such an election system did not exist. Various competing reforms such as Instant Runoff, Top Two Runoff, Approval, and Score Voting were all improvements on our current system, but none of them fully encouraged voter honesty and each came with it's own trade-offs and pit-falls.

Running AllDup on my Elections folder keeps finding duplicate files in the Imagery folder:

Capitol OR.jpg
Capitol.jpg

Web Graphics.002 copy.png
Web Graphics.002.png

Six candidates.jpg 
Six_candidates.jpg 

Nader Cartoon.jpg 
Nader.jpg 

California Top Two.jpg 
California_Top_Two.jpg

Web Graphics.003 copy.png 
Web Graphics.003.png 

Front Page Graphics.001.jpg 
Front_Page_Graphics.001.jpg 

Web Graphics.018.jpg 
Web Graphics.028.jpg 

RIRV Occupy.001.jpg 
RIRV_Occupy.001.jpg 

RIRV ballot.001.png 
RIRV_ballot.001.png 

Approval and Plurality Ballots.jpg
Ballots.jpg 

SRV results.png
SRV_results.png 
Web Graphics.005.png 

TopTwo System.jpg 
TopTwo.jpg 

RIRV results.001.png 
RIRV_results.001.png 

Rating Ballot.jpg 
Rating.jpg 

IRV Counting.png 
IRV_Counting.png 

This image from http://www.equal.vote/srvvsirv:

• Should say "Voter Satisfaction →" or something similar along the X axis to indicate that right is good and left is bad
• Letters abcdef next to strategy should be removed (they have no bearing on the plot)
• The word "strategy" is cut off on the right side of the image, or abbreviated as strat. make them consistent
• There's no red dot for Approval, is it hidden behind another dot? Maybe color them halfway to show where the dots are? (Top half red, bottom half whatever) or stagger them up and down a little if they overlap perfectly?

Also maybe clarify that 100% 1-sided strategy is a very unrealistic scenario.

I think the "yes, it's really that simple" is not good. If you have to say it, it gives people the wrong impression. It's like saying "it's not a scam!" which makes people start thinking about scams, the opposite of the intention.

This is objectively far more complex than the current system, so asserting simplicity as though that's the feature is misguided.

For the wording, I think "automatic runoff" is actually a better term than "instant runoff" not only to differentiate from IRV, but because the automatic nature of it is far more important than the instant aspect.

How about:

"The two candidates scored highest by voters overall go to an automatic runoff. In the runoff, if you scored one candidate higher than the other, then they get your vote."

?

I'd consider then saying "So with score runoff, we select from the candidates with the most overall approval, and we maximize every voter's chance to express their preference among the top two without losing the chance to express their judgment of other candidates." or something similar. Point is to emphasize how great the process is.

We could say also something like, "the results are clear and transparent, and, unlike strictly ranked voting, everyone can easily understand how any one ballot or any precinct or regional results relate to the overall result."

• That the spoiler aspect of IRV happens in a range of support that is inherently between low-popularity of a candidate and high-enough-popularity to win.
  • I.e. Rather than being an edge case, the spoiler situation is almost inevitable for any candidate or party who grows in popularity over multiple elections or similar instead of jumping from low to high popularity (technically, this assumes that a party's growth isn't drawn 100% from one other party)
• That the IRV issue can be easily described as "splitting the vote" in rounds prior to the final one
• That any rank system with less rankings than candidates leads toward lesser-evil voting and vote inequality
• That the history of IRV in practice indicates dominance of 2-parties rather than enabling 3rd- and 4th-party inclusion

• In the IRV wording on the ballot, "goes to your next choice (if any)" should be more explicitly clear: "goes to your next choice (if you marked one and they have not yet been eliminated)". That would itself clear up the entire issue of understanding IRV.

Thought of this per http://www.equal.vote/srvvsirv first and foremost.

I suggest a short summary at the top that says something like:

Traditional instant-runoff: voters set ranked order (no ties!); candidates with fewest 1st-choice votes are eliminated one-by-one in series of rounds. Voters think their rankings all get counted, but when candidate is eliminated, all remaining 2nd and 3rd choice votes for them never count at all.

Score Runoff: voters score as many candidates as they want; one instant-runoff round considers preferences between the top two scoring candidates. All scores from all voters get counted equally.

(Then maybe say "Read on for more details and discussion of the differences and similarities between these two forms of instant runoff voting")

There are two scenarios that the SRV Election Calculator currently doesn't appear to handle correctly:

1. Three or more candidates tie for first place in scoring, or two or more candidates tie for second place.
2. The top two candidates are equally preferred among voters.

As far as I can tell, these scenarios should be handled as a tie. However, the calculator will instead assign a winner, influenced arbitrarily by the ordering of candidates.

Don't let someone else get star.vote! Register that ASAP and mirror equal.vote or redirect to equal.vote

Example: https://www.equal.vote/uftv_2 looks like

1. http://www.equal.vote/theequalvote
2. See heading "Which Voting Methods definitively provide an equal vote?"
3. Notice that the only bold words in a tl;dr length paragraph are "Ranked Choice"
4. conclude (wrongly!!) that Ranked Choice systems provide an equal vote

Fix this!!!!

Maybe change to a heading of which do NOT that mentions Ranked Choice, and add a heading for which DO, and highlight Rating/score. That's one of a few solutions.

It's EXTREMELY important that EVERY page on the site provide the correct information if someone skims only the headings and bolded words or phrases. NEVER EVER put a contradictory emphasis below a heading, keep them consistent.

http://www.equal.vote/srvvsapproval talks about Score a little, but it was hard for me to understand how SRV is supposed to be better than Score. I think it would help to explain how strategic max/minimization works, and how SRV discourages it. For explaining how strategy works, I made some graphs here.

I think it could say something along the lines of "SRV's runoff round encourages ranking the candidates", and so SRV is "a blend between rating and ranking systems" or "the best of both worlds".

• The 2nd round strongly encourages giving different candidates different ratings, so it pressures you to consider which one you really prefer (a benefit of ranking systems)
• It allows you to give two candidates the same score if you truly like them both equally (a benefit of rating systems)
• It allows expressing strong vs weak preferences, instead of distorting them all to equal weight (a flaw of ranking systems)

So an SRV ballot is like a ranking ballot, but allowing unequal steps between the rankings and with the option for ties.

The closed primary could be further spelled out how horrible it is.

• Many people aren't so partisan, but declare a party just to get a vote
• A local region that is Republican-dominated in our Democratic State fundamentally makes voters choose between getting a say in local primaries that matter or in state-level / federal-level primaries that matter — they cannot have a vote in both

Probably not for the front page, but I'd include this along with other things on a dedicated page about how partisan primaries are fundamentally awful. I.e. a page about the primary system in general. It should also answer FAQs about primaries and address assumptions about them etc.

New strategy to emphasize:

• Strategic tactics are possible with any system
• Voters still want to be honest, they like registering their judgments
• The primary cause of widespread strategic voting is not crafty tactics, it's experience with votes where 100% honesty gives bad results (e.g. Burlington)

So, I think this is an absolutely KEY issue. People aren't strategic today because they are partisan or looking for ways to be strategic. They are strategic because spoilers have happened and bitten us badly and people then vote strategically to avoid that.

So, ironically, the most important factor in promoting honest voting isn't how susceptible to strategy a system is, it's how good it is when people are honest. In traditional IRV, honesty can hurt! Honest votes can give bad results for will of voters! THAT is the source of strategic voting, and is the reason we are all concerned about the negative prospect of more spread of traditional IRV!

SRV gives great results from honest votes, and that is the most significant factor in reducing strategic voting!!

This is a good part of why I've never really supported any rank system… to be clear, I've always realized that some are better than others, but the idea that multiple approaches can be used to interpret the same ballot, e.g. IRV vs Ranked Pairs vs Borda seems to me to be a flaw in the ballot itself. The key thing is that it should be as clear as possible from the simple ballot how the vote will get counted.

Systems where voters know with total clarity and certainty exactly how their vote is counted

• Plurality/FPTP
• Approval
• Score

Systems where voters need to grasp the rules but can understand easily enough and then know for sure what their vote means

• Score Runoff
• Ranked Pairs

Systems where voters must understand the rules and even still do not really know when or whether their ballots will get fully counted

• IRV

In other words, as a voter, with approval voting and score voting you simply know "giving candidate X 4 points gives them 4 points relative to whatever I score anyone else" and that holds true. Score Runoff is mostly that way, although the Runoff stage is a tad quirky but can be understood easily enough. With Ranked Pairs, you can say "I know that my preference of B over C will get counted in the system running through all the pairings".

But with IRV, nope. Voters cannot realistically understand whether their 2nd-choice votes will ever count and if so in what way. Either they know that this is totally unclear, or, worse, they think their votes will count (trust that the system is churning out a result that considers their rankings) but they are wrong.

I.e. IRV is uniquely bad in deceiving voters. For me, this core issue of voters-know-what-their-vote-does (not in terms of complex results of splitting, just in the basic sense of they know correctly how the system uses their ballot) is a huge issue. I think it's part of why IRV may not even be better than plurality.

So, maybe this issue can be added to the site in some appropriate place.

HOMEPAGE: "When Progressives created the partisan primary election more than a century ago to give voters, not the party bosses in “smoke filled back rooms,” the choice of which of the two major party candidates would compete in the general election, they inadvertently created a new inequality in the vote.

"Here in Oregon, for example, more than a third of us don't affiliate with either the Democratic or Republican parties and another 17% are in the minority in “safe” districts that give just one party so much of an advantage that whomever is chosen in their primary always wins the general election. In total, the partisan primary denies more than half of Oregon's voters a meaningful representative vote.

"In 2016, the primary system demonstrably failed on the national level as well: ultimately U.S. voters were given a choice between two major party candidates for President, both of whom were disliked by a strong majority of the electorate."

SUGGESTION: The partisan primary was originally created in an attempt to give voters, not the party bosses in “smoke filled back rooms,” the power to choose who would compete in the general election but as it functions today the primary inadvertently added a new layer of inequality.

Here in Oregon more than a third of us aren't affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican parties. Another 17% live in districts where the opposite side always wins and our Party's candidates don't stand a chance. In total this means that the majority of us actually have no say in who we would like to see in the general election.

In 2016, the primary system failed on the national level as well: U.S. voters were given a choice between two major party candidates for President, both of whom were disliked by a strong majority of the electorate. OPTIONAL LAST BIT! If the primary had used Score Runoff Voting or if the 43% of Americans that were registered Independent had been able to vote in the primaries neither candidate would have made it to the general election and neither would be our President today."

at https://www.equal.vote/Burlington there's a Fairvote link at the bottom going to https://www.equal.vote/fairvote.org instead of just to fairvote.org

I think the link should just be removed, as there's no need in that context to link directly to their homepage.