What do you think the final voting mechanism should be, and why? E.g. approval voting, ranked-choice voting, quadratic voting, etc.
Considerations might include: how well this will allocate funds based on real preferences, how understandable it is to people who are participating in the Donation Election or following it, etc.
I realize that I might be opening a can of worms, but I’m looking forward to reading any comments! I might not have time to respond.
Users will be able to “pre-vote” (to signal that they’re likely to vote for some candidates, and possibly to follow posts about some candidates), for as many candidates as they want. The pre-votes are anonymous (as are final votes), but the total numbers will be shown to everyone. There will be a separate process for final voting, which will determine the three winners in the election. The three winners will receive the winnings from the Donation Election Fund, split proportionally based on the votes.
Only users who had an account as of October 22, 2023, will be able to vote, unfortunately. We’ve had to add this restriction to avoid election manipulation (we’ll also be monitoring in other ways). I realize that this limits genuine new users’ ability to vote, but hopefully the fact that newer users can participate in other ways (like by encouraging others to vote for some candidates, or by donating to candidates/the Donation Election Fund) helps a bit.
A quick preview of the pre-votes, in case you’re interested:
I’m a researcher on voting theory, with a focus on voting over how to divide a budget between uses. Sorry I found this post late, so probably things are already decided but I thought I’d add my thoughts. I’m going to assume approval voting as input format.
There is an important high-level decision to make first regarding the objective: do we want to pick charities with the highest support (majoritarian) or do we want to give everyone equal influence on the outcome if possible (proportionality)?
If the answer is “majoritarian”, then the simplest method makes the most sense: give all the money to the charity with the highest approval score. (This maximizes the sum of voter utilities, if you define voter utility to be the amount of money that goes to the charities a voter approves.)
If the answer is “proportionality”, my top recommendation would be to drop the idea of having only 3 winners and not impose a limit, and instead use the Nash Product rule to decide how the money is split [paper, wikipedia]. This rule has a nice interpretation where let’s say there are 100 voters, then every voter is assigned 1/100th of the budget and gets a guarantee that this part is only spent on charities that the voter has approved. The exact proportions of how the voter share is used is decided based on the overall popularity of the charities. This rule has various nice properties, including Pareto efficiency and strong proportionality properties (guaranteeing things like “if 30% of voters vote for animal charities, then 30% of the budget will be spent on animal charities”).
If you want to stick with the 3 winner constraint, there is no academic research about this exact type of voting situation. But if proportionality is desired, I would select the 3 winners as not the 3 charities with the highest vote score, but instead use Proportional Approval Voting [wikipedia] to make the selection. This would avoid the issue that @Tetraspace identified in another comment, where there is a risk that all 3 top charities are similar and belong to the largest subgroup of voters. Once the selection of 3 charities is done, I would not split the money in proportion to approval scores but either (a) split it equally, or (b) normalize the scores so that a voter who approved 2 of the 3 winners contributes 0.5 points to each of them, instead of 1 point to each. Otherwise those who approved 2 out of 3 get higher voting weight.
This maximizes the sum of voter utilities, if you define voter utility to be the amount of money that goes to the charities a voter approves
This definition of “voter utility” feels very different to how EAs think about charities: the definition would imply that you are indifferent between all charities that you approve of.
A better definition of “voter utility” would take into account the relative worth of the charities (eg a voter might think that charitiy A is 3x better than charity B, which is 5x better than charity C).
I think since there can be multiple winners, letting people vote on the ideal distribution then averaging those distributions would be better than direct voting, since it most directly represents “how voters think the funds should be split on average” or similar, which seems like what you want to capture? And also is still very understandable I hope.
E.g. if I think 75% of the pool should go to LTFF and 20% to GiveWell, and 5% to the EA AWF, 0% to all the rest, I vote 75%/20%/5%/0%/0%/0% etc. Then, you take the average of those distributions across all voters. I guess it gets tricky if you are only paying out to the top three, but maybe you can just scale their percentage splits? IDK.
If not that or if it is annoying to implement, IMO approval voting or quadratic are probably best, but am not really sure. Ranked choice feels like it is so explicitly designed for single winner elections that it is harder to apply here.
If we’re thinking of it as “ideally I’d like 75% of the money to go here, 20% here, etc” we could just give people 100 votes each and give money to the top 3?
This would be very similar to first-past-the-post (third-past-the-post in this case), and has many of the same drawbacks as first-past-the-post, such as lots of strategic voting. Giving a voice to people who’s favorite charities are not wildly popular seems preferable (as would be the case with ranked-choice voting). The fact that you have 100 votes instead of 1 vote doesnt make much of a difference here (imagine a country where everyone has 99 clones, election systems would mostly still have the same advantages and disadvantages).
I think this could be fun. An advantage here is that voters have to think about the relative value of different charities, rather than just deciding which are better or worse. This could also be an important aspect when we want people to discuss how they plan to vote/how others should vote.
If you want to be explicit about this, you could also consider designing the user interface so that users enter these relative differences of charities directly (e.g. “I vote charity A to be 3 times as good as charity B” rather than “I assign 90 vote credits to charity A and 10 vote credits to charity B”).
Note however, that due to the top-3 cutoff, putting in the true relative differences between charities might not be the optimal policy.
A technical remark: If you want only to do payouts for the top three candidates, instead of just relying on the final vote, I think it would be better to rescale the voting credits of each voter after kicking out the charity with the least votes and then repeating the process until there are only 3 charities left. This would reduce tactical voting and would respect voters more who pick unusual charities as their top choices. This process has some similarities with ranked-choice voting. Additionally, users should have the ability to enter large relative differences (or very tiny votes like 1 in a billion), so their votes are still meaningful even after many eliminations.
Approval voting:
I think voting either “approve” or “disapprove” does not match how EAs think about charities.
I generally approve a lot of charities within EA space, but would not vote “approve” for these charities.
I worry that a lot of tactical voting can take place here, especially if people can see the current votes or the pre-votes.
For example, a person who both approves of the 3rd-placed charity and the 4th-placed charity (by overall popularity), might want to switch their vote to “disapprove” for the (according to them) worse charity.
For example, voters are incentivized to give different votes to the 3rd-placed and 4th-placed charity, because there the difference will have the biggest impact on money paid out.
Or a person who disapproves of all the top charities might switch a vote from “disapprove” to “approve” so that their vote matters at all.
Ranked-choice voting:
I am assuming here that the elimination process in ranked-choice stops once you reach the top 3 and that votes are then distributed proportionally. I think this would be a good implementation choice (mostly because proportional voting itself would be a decent choice by itself, so doing it for the top 3 seems reasonable).
Ranking charities could be more satisfying for voters than having to figure out where to draw the line between “approve” and “disapprove”, or putting in lots of numeric values.
Generally, ranked-choice voting seems like an ok choice.
how well will these allocate funds?:
I am quite unsure here, and finding a best charity based on expressed preferences of lots of people with lots of opinions will be difficult in any case.
My best guess here is that ranked-choice voting > quadratic voting > approval voting.
A disadvantage of quadratic voting here is that it can happen that some fraction of the money will be paid out to sub-optimal charities (even if everyone agrees that charity C is worse than A and B, then it will likely still be rational for voters to assign non-zero weight to charity C, corresponding to non-zero payout).
understandability:
I think approval voting is easier to understand than ranked-choice voting, which is easier to understand than quadratic voting. This is both for the user interface and for understanding the whole system.
Also, the mental effort for making a voting decision is less under ranked-choice and approval voting.
I think the precise effects of the voters choices will be difficult to estimate in any system, so keeping
general remarks:
Different voting mechanisms can be useful for different purposes, and paying 3 charities different amounts of money is a different use case than selecting a single president, so not all considerations and analyses of different voting mechanisms will carry over to our particular case.
The top-3 rule will incentivize tactical voting in all these systems (whereas in a purely proportional system there would be no tactical voting). Maybe this number should be increased a bit (especially if we use quadratic voting).
If there are lots of charities to choose from, it will be quite an effort to evaluate all these charities.
Potentially, you could give each voter a small number of charities to compare with each other, and then aggregate the result somehow (although that would be complicated and would change the character of the election).
Or there can be two phases of voting, where the first phase narrows it down to 3-5 charities and then the second phase determines the proportions.
My personal preferences:
Obviously, we should have a meta-vote to select the three top voting methods among user-suggested voting methods and then hold three elections with the respective voting methods, each determining how a fraction of the fund (proportional to the vote that the voting method received in the meta-vote) gets distributed. And as for the voting method for this meta-vote, we should use… ok, this meta-voting stuff was not meant entirely seriously.
In my current personal judgement, I prefer quadratic voting over ranked-choice and ranked-choice over approval voting.
I might be biased here towards more complex systems.
I think an important factor is also that I might like more data about my preferences as a voter:
With quadratic voting, I can express my relative preferences between charities quantitatively.
With ranked-choice voting, I can rank charities, but cannot say by how much I prefer one charity over another.
With approval voting, I can put charities in only two categories.
One issue that comes up with multi-winner approval voting is: suppose there are 15 longtermists and 10 global poverty people. All the longtermists approve the LTFF, MIRI, and Redwood; all the global poverty people approve the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and LEEP.
The top three vote winners are picked: they’re the LTFF, with 15 votes, MIRI, with 15 votes, and Redwood, with 15 votes.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that approval voting is the best option here. Why?
It avoids almost all of the problems with plurality voting. In non-pathological arrangments of voter preferences and candidates, it will produce the ‘intuitively’ correct option—see here for some fun visualisations.
It has EA cred, see Aaron Hamlin’s interview on 80k here
And most importantly, it’s understandable and legible—you don’t need people to trust an underlying apportionment algorithm or send the flyers explaining theD’Hondt method to voters or whatever. Just vote for the options you approve of on the ballot. One person, one ballot. Most approvals wins. Simple.
I fear that EAs who are really into this sort-of thing are going to nerd-snipe the whole thing into a discussion/natural experiment about optimal voting systems instead of what would be most practical for this Donation Election. A lot of potential voters and donors may not be interested in using a super fancy optimal but technically involved voting method, and be the kind of small inconvenience that might turn people off the whole enterprise.
Now, before all you Seeing Like a State fans come at me saying how legibility is the devil’s work I think I’m just going to disagree with you pre-emptively.[1] Sometimes there is a tradeoff between fidelity and legibility, and too much weighting on illegible technocracy can engender a lack of trust and have severe negative consequences.
Actually it’s interesting that Glen references Scott as on his side, I think there’s actually some tension between their positions. But that’s probably a topic for another post/discussion
Won’t people be motivated to disapprove vote orgs in all cause areas but their preferred one? That would seemingly reduce approval voting to FPTP as between cause areas in effect.
Well, the top 3 charities will get chosen, so there’s no benefit to you only selecting 1 option alone unless you really do believe only that 1 charity ought to get funded. I think AV may be more robust to these concerns than some think,[1] all I think all voting systems will have these edge cases.
I also may be willing simply bite the bullet here and trade-off a bit of strategic voting for legibility. But again, I don’t think approval is worse than this than many other voting methods.
But my fundamental objection is that this is primarily a normative problem, where we want to be a community who’ll vote honestly and not strategically. If GWWC endorse approval voting, then when you submit your votes there could be a pop-up with “I pledge not to vote strategically” or something like that.
I don’t think any voting system is immune to that—Democracy works well because of the norms it spreads and trust it instills, as opposed to being the optimal transmission mechanism of individual preferences to a social welfare function imho.
Thanks. I assume there will be at least 3 orgs for each cause area.
If we can assume the forum is a “community who’ll vote honestly and not strategically,” approval voting would work—but we shouldn’t limit the winners to three in that case. Proportional representation among all orgs with net positive approval would be the fullest extent of the community’s views, although some floor on support or cap on winners would be necessary for logistical reasons.
I’d prefer a voting mechanism that factored in as much of the vote as possible. I suspect that cause area will be a major determinant of individuals’ votes, and would prefer that the voting structure promote engagement and participation for people with varying cause prioritizations.
Suppose we have 40% for cause A orgs, 25% for cause B orgs, 20% for cause C orgs, and 15% for various smaller causes. I would not prefer a method likely to select three organizations from cause A—I don’t think that outcome would be actually representative of the polis, and voting rules that would lead to such an outcome will discourage engagement and participation from people who sense that their preferred causes are not the leading one.
I’m not sure how to effectuate that preference in a voting system, although maybe people who have thought about voting systems more deeply than I could figure it out. I do think approval voting would be problematic; some voters might strategically disapprove all candidates except in their preferred cause area, which could turn the election into a cause-area election rather than an organization-specific one. Otherwise, it might be appropriate to assign each organization to a cause area, and provide that (e.g.) no more than half of all funds will go to organizations in the same cause area. If that rule were invoked, it would likely require selecting additional organizations than the initial three.
The more I think about this, the more I’d like at least one winner to be selected randomly among orgs that reach a certain vote threshold—unsure if it should be weighted by vote total or equal between orgs. Maybe that org gets 15 to 20 percent of the take? That’s a legible way to keep minority voices engaged despite knowing their preferences won’t end up reflected in the top three.
Proportional voting with some number of votes. between 1 and 10.
If it were me, the thing I’d experiment on is being able to donate votes to someone else. That feels like something I’d like to see more of on a larger scale. I give a vote to Jenifer and Alan, she researches longterm stuff, he looks into animal welfare.
FWIW, I mildly disagree with this, because a major part of the appeal of donation elections stuff (if done well) is that the results more closely model a community consensus than other giving mechanisms, and being able to donate votes would distort that in some sense. I think I don’t see the appeal of being able to donate votes in this context over just telling Jenifer + Alan that they can control where one donates to some extent, or donating to a fund. Or, if not donating to the election fund, just asking Jenifer + Alan for their opinion and changing your own mind accordingly.
Do you intend to have one final winner or would it be ok to pay out the fund to various charities in different proportions (maybe with a minimum payout to avoid logistical hassle)? In the latter case, a consideration could also be proportional voting. But it is not clear how approval voting and ranked choice would work exactly in those cases.
Also, am I understanding correctly that donating more to that fund does not get you additional votes?
We’re planning on having 3 winners, and we’ll allocate the funding proportionally across those three winners. So e.g. if we do approval voting, and candidate A gets 5 votes, B gets 2, C gets 20, and D gets 25, and we’re distributing $100, then A (5 votes), C (20 votes), and D win (25 votes) and we’d send $10 to A, $40 to C, and $50 to D. I think this would straightforwardly work with quadratic voting (each person just has multiple vote-points). I haven’t thought enough about how “proportional” allocation would work with ranked-choice votes.
And yep, donating more to that fund won’t get you additional votes.
Edit: I’ve now shared: Donation Election: how voting will work. Really grateful for the discussion on this thread!
We’re planning on running a Donation Election for Giving Season.
What do you think the final voting mechanism should be, and why? E.g. approval voting, ranked-choice voting, quadratic voting, etc.
Considerations might include: how well this will allocate funds based on real preferences, how understandable it is to people who are participating in the Donation Election or following it, etc.
I realize that I might be opening a can of worms, but I’m looking forward to reading any comments! I might not have time to respond.
Some context (see also the post):
Users will be able to “pre-vote” (to signal that they’re likely to vote for some candidates, and possibly to follow posts about some candidates), for as many candidates as they want. The pre-votes are anonymous (as are final votes), but the total numbers will be shown to everyone. There will be a separate process for final voting, which will determine the three winners in the election. The three winners will receive the winnings from the Donation Election Fund, split proportionally based on the votes.
Only users who had an account as of October 22, 2023, will be able to vote, unfortunately. We’ve had to add this restriction to avoid election manipulation (we’ll also be monitoring in other ways). I realize that this limits genuine new users’ ability to vote, but hopefully the fact that newer users can participate in other ways (like by encouraging others to vote for some candidates, or by donating to candidates/the Donation Election Fund) helps a bit.
A quick preview of the pre-votes, in case you’re interested:
I’m a researcher on voting theory, with a focus on voting over how to divide a budget between uses. Sorry I found this post late, so probably things are already decided but I thought I’d add my thoughts. I’m going to assume approval voting as input format.
There is an important high-level decision to make first regarding the objective: do we want to pick charities with the highest support (majoritarian) or do we want to give everyone equal influence on the outcome if possible (proportionality)?
If the answer is “majoritarian”, then the simplest method makes the most sense: give all the money to the charity with the highest approval score. (This maximizes the sum of voter utilities, if you define voter utility to be the amount of money that goes to the charities a voter approves.)
If the answer is “proportionality”, my top recommendation would be to drop the idea of having only 3 winners and not impose a limit, and instead use the Nash Product rule to decide how the money is split [paper, wikipedia]. This rule has a nice interpretation where let’s say there are 100 voters, then every voter is assigned 1/100th of the budget and gets a guarantee that this part is only spent on charities that the voter has approved. The exact proportions of how the voter share is used is decided based on the overall popularity of the charities. This rule has various nice properties, including Pareto efficiency and strong proportionality properties (guaranteeing things like “if 30% of voters vote for animal charities, then 30% of the budget will be spent on animal charities”).
If you want to stick with the 3 winner constraint, there is no academic research about this exact type of voting situation. But if proportionality is desired, I would select the 3 winners as not the 3 charities with the highest vote score, but instead use Proportional Approval Voting [wikipedia] to make the selection. This would avoid the issue that @Tetraspace identified in another comment, where there is a risk that all 3 top charities are similar and belong to the largest subgroup of voters. Once the selection of 3 charities is done, I would not split the money in proportion to approval scores but either (a) split it equally, or (b) normalize the scores so that a voter who approved 2 of the 3 winners contributes 0.5 points to each of them, instead of 1 point to each. Otherwise those who approved 2 out of 3 get higher voting weight.
I’m happy to discuss further.
This definition of “voter utility” feels very different to how EAs think about charities: the definition would imply that you are indifferent between all charities that you approve of. A better definition of “voter utility” would take into account the relative worth of the charities (eg a voter might think that charitiy A is 3x better than charity B, which is 5x better than charity C).
I think since there can be multiple winners, letting people vote on the ideal distribution then averaging those distributions would be better than direct voting, since it most directly represents “how voters think the funds should be split on average” or similar, which seems like what you want to capture? And also is still very understandable I hope.
E.g. if I think 75% of the pool should go to LTFF and 20% to GiveWell, and 5% to the EA AWF, 0% to all the rest, I vote 75%/20%/5%/0%/0%/0% etc. Then, you take the average of those distributions across all voters. I guess it gets tricky if you are only paying out to the top three, but maybe you can just scale their percentage splits? IDK.
If not that or if it is annoying to implement, IMO approval voting or quadratic are probably best, but am not really sure. Ranked choice feels like it is so explicitly designed for single winner elections that it is harder to apply here.
If we’re thinking of it as “ideally I’d like 75% of the money to go here, 20% here, etc” we could just give people 100 votes each and give money to the top 3?
Yeah definitely—that’s a more elegant way.
This would be very similar to first-past-the-post (third-past-the-post in this case), and has many of the same drawbacks as first-past-the-post, such as lots of strategic voting. Giving a voice to people who’s favorite charities are not wildly popular seems preferable (as would be the case with ranked-choice voting). The fact that you have 100 votes instead of 1 vote doesnt make much of a difference here (imagine a country where everyone has 99 clones, election systems would mostly still have the same advantages and disadvantages).
some thoughts on different mechanisms:
Quadratic voting:
I think this could be fun. An advantage here is that voters have to think about the relative value of different charities, rather than just deciding which are better or worse. This could also be an important aspect when we want people to discuss how they plan to vote/how others should vote. If you want to be explicit about this, you could also consider designing the user interface so that users enter these relative differences of charities directly (e.g. “I vote charity A to be 3 times as good as charity B” rather than “I assign 90 vote credits to charity A and 10 vote credits to charity B”). Note however, that due to the top-3 cutoff, putting in the true relative differences between charities might not be the optimal policy.
A technical remark: If you want only to do payouts for the top three candidates, instead of just relying on the final vote, I think it would be better to rescale the voting credits of each voter after kicking out the charity with the least votes and then repeating the process until there are only 3 charities left. This would reduce tactical voting and would respect voters more who pick unusual charities as their top choices. This process has some similarities with ranked-choice voting. Additionally, users should have the ability to enter large relative differences (or very tiny votes like 1 in a billion), so their votes are still meaningful even after many eliminations.
Approval voting:
I think voting either “approve” or “disapprove” does not match how EAs think about charities. I generally approve a lot of charities within EA space, but would not vote “approve” for these charities.
I worry that a lot of tactical voting can take place here, especially if people can see the current votes or the pre-votes. For example, a person who both approves of the 3rd-placed charity and the 4th-placed charity (by overall popularity), might want to switch their vote to “disapprove” for the (according to them) worse charity. For example, voters are incentivized to give different votes to the 3rd-placed and 4th-placed charity, because there the difference will have the biggest impact on money paid out. Or a person who disapproves of all the top charities might switch a vote from “disapprove” to “approve” so that their vote matters at all.
Ranked-choice voting:
I am assuming here that the elimination process in ranked-choice stops once you reach the top 3 and that votes are then distributed proportionally. I think this would be a good implementation choice (mostly because proportional voting itself would be a decent choice by itself, so doing it for the top 3 seems reasonable). Ranking charities could be more satisfying for voters than having to figure out where to draw the line between “approve” and “disapprove”, or putting in lots of numeric values.
Generally, ranked-choice voting seems like an ok choice.
how well will these allocate funds?:
I am quite unsure here, and finding a best charity based on expressed preferences of lots of people with lots of opinions will be difficult in any case. My best guess here is that ranked-choice voting > quadratic voting > approval voting. A disadvantage of quadratic voting here is that it can happen that some fraction of the money will be paid out to sub-optimal charities (even if everyone agrees that charity C is worse than A and B, then it will likely still be rational for voters to assign non-zero weight to charity C, corresponding to non-zero payout).
understandability:
I think approval voting is easier to understand than ranked-choice voting, which is easier to understand than quadratic voting. This is both for the user interface and for understanding the whole system. Also, the mental effort for making a voting decision is less under ranked-choice and approval voting. I think the precise effects of the voters choices will be difficult to estimate in any system, so keeping
general remarks:
Different voting mechanisms can be useful for different purposes, and paying 3 charities different amounts of money is a different use case than selecting a single president, so not all considerations and analyses of different voting mechanisms will carry over to our particular case. The top-3 rule will incentivize tactical voting in all these systems (whereas in a purely proportional system there would be no tactical voting). Maybe this number should be increased a bit (especially if we use quadratic voting). If there are lots of charities to choose from, it will be quite an effort to evaluate all these charities. Potentially, you could give each voter a small number of charities to compare with each other, and then aggregate the result somehow (although that would be complicated and would change the character of the election). Or there can be two phases of voting, where the first phase narrows it down to 3-5 charities and then the second phase determines the proportions.
My personal preferences:
Obviously, we should have a meta-vote to select the three top voting methods among user-suggested voting methods and then hold three elections with the respective voting methods, each determining how a fraction of the fund (proportional to the vote that the voting method received in the meta-vote) gets distributed. And as for the voting method for this meta-vote, we should use… ok, this meta-voting stuff was not meant entirely seriously.
In my current personal judgement, I prefer quadratic voting over ranked-choice and ranked-choice over approval voting. I might be biased here towards more complex systems. I think an important factor is also that I might like more data about my preferences as a voter: With quadratic voting, I can express my relative preferences between charities quantitatively. With ranked-choice voting, I can rank charities, but cannot say by how much I prefer one charity over another. With approval voting, I can put charities in only two categories.
One issue that comes up with multi-winner approval voting is: suppose there are 15 longtermists and 10 global poverty people. All the longtermists approve the LTFF, MIRI, and Redwood; all the global poverty people approve the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and LEEP.
The top three vote winners are picked: they’re the LTFF, with 15 votes, MIRI, with 15 votes, and Redwood, with 15 votes.
It is maybe undesirable that 40% of the people in this toy example think those charities are useless, yet 0% of money is going to charities that aren’t those. (Or maybe it’s not! If a coin lands heads 60% of the time; then you bet on heads 100% of the time.)
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that approval voting is the best option here. Why?
It avoids almost all of the problems with plurality voting. In non-pathological arrangments of voter preferences and candidates, it will produce the ‘intuitively’ correct option—see here for some fun visualisations.
It has EA cred, see Aaron Hamlin’s interview on 80k here
And most importantly, it’s understandable and legible—you don’t need people to trust an underlying apportionment algorithm or send the flyers explaining the D’Hondt method to voters or whatever. Just vote for the options you approve of on the ballot. One person, one ballot. Most approvals wins. Simple.
I fear that EAs who are really into this sort-of thing are going to nerd-snipe the whole thing into a discussion/natural experiment about optimal voting systems instead of what would be most practical for this Donation Election. A lot of potential voters and donors may not be interested in using a super fancy optimal but technically involved voting method, and be the kind of small inconvenience that might turn people off the whole enterprise.
Now, before all you Seeing Like a State fans come at me saying how legibility is the devil’s work I think I’m just going to disagree with you pre-emptively.[1] Sometimes there is a tradeoff between fidelity and legibility, and too much weighting on illegible technocracy can engender a lack of trust and have severe negative consequences.
Actually it’s interesting that Glen references Scott as on his side, I think there’s actually some tension between their positions. But that’s probably a topic for another post/discussion
Won’t people be motivated to disapprove vote orgs in all cause areas but their preferred one? That would seemingly reduce approval voting to FPTP as between cause areas in effect.
Well, the top 3 charities will get chosen, so there’s no benefit to you only selecting 1 option alone unless you really do believe only that 1 charity ought to get funded. I think AV may be more robust to these concerns than some think,[1] all I think all voting systems will have these edge cases.
I also may be willing simply bite the bullet here and trade-off a bit of strategic voting for legibility. But again, I don’t think approval is worse than this than many other voting methods.
But my fundamental objection is that this is primarily a normative problem, where we want to be a community who’ll vote honestly and not strategically. If GWWC endorse approval voting, then when you submit your votes there could be a pop-up with “I pledge not to vote strategically” or something like that.
I don’t think any voting system is immune to that—Democracy works well because of the norms it spreads and trust it instills, as opposed to being the optimal transmission mechanism of individual preferences to a social welfare function imho.
or here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7539-3_2
Thanks. I assume there will be at least 3 orgs for each cause area.
If we can assume the forum is a “community who’ll vote honestly and not strategically,” approval voting would work—but we shouldn’t limit the winners to three in that case. Proportional representation among all orgs with net positive approval would be the fullest extent of the community’s views, although some floor on support or cap on winners would be necessary for logistical reasons.
I’d prefer a voting mechanism that factored in as much of the vote as possible. I suspect that cause area will be a major determinant of individuals’ votes, and would prefer that the voting structure promote engagement and participation for people with varying cause prioritizations.
Suppose we have 40% for cause A orgs, 25% for cause B orgs, 20% for cause C orgs, and 15% for various smaller causes. I would not prefer a method likely to select three organizations from cause A—I don’t think that outcome would be actually representative of the polis, and voting rules that would lead to such an outcome will discourage engagement and participation from people who sense that their preferred causes are not the leading one.
I’m not sure how to effectuate that preference in a voting system, although maybe people who have thought about voting systems more deeply than I could figure it out. I do think approval voting would be problematic; some voters might strategically disapprove all candidates except in their preferred cause area, which could turn the election into a cause-area election rather than an organization-specific one. Otherwise, it might be appropriate to assign each organization to a cause area, and provide that (e.g.) no more than half of all funds will go to organizations in the same cause area. If that rule were invoked, it would likely require selecting additional organizations than the initial three.
The more I think about this, the more I’d like at least one winner to be selected randomly among orgs that reach a certain vote threshold—unsure if it should be weighted by vote total or equal between orgs. Maybe that org gets 15 to 20 percent of the take? That’s a legible way to keep minority voices engaged despite knowing their preferences won’t end up reflected in the top three.
Proportional voting with some number of votes. between 1 and 10.
If it were me, the thing I’d experiment on is being able to donate votes to someone else. That feels like something I’d like to see more of on a larger scale. I give a vote to Jenifer and Alan, she researches longterm stuff, he looks into animal welfare.
FWIW, I mildly disagree with this, because a major part of the appeal of donation elections stuff (if done well) is that the results more closely model a community consensus than other giving mechanisms, and being able to donate votes would distort that in some sense. I think I don’t see the appeal of being able to donate votes in this context over just telling Jenifer + Alan that they can control where one donates to some extent, or donating to a fund. Or, if not donating to the election fund, just asking Jenifer + Alan for their opinion and changing your own mind accordingly.
edit: I should have read the post more carefully
Do you intend to have one final winner or would it be ok to pay out the fund to various charities in different proportions (maybe with a minimum payout to avoid logistical hassle)? In the latter case, a consideration could also be proportional voting. But it is not clear how approval voting and ranked choice would work exactly in those cases.Also, am I understanding correctly that donating more to that fund does not get you additional votes?We’re planning on having 3 winners, and we’ll allocate the funding proportionally across those three winners. So e.g. if we do approval voting, and candidate A gets 5 votes, B gets 2, C gets 20, and D gets 25, and we’re distributing $100, then A (5 votes), C (20 votes), and D win (25 votes) and we’d send $10 to A, $40 to C, and $50 to D. I think this would straightforwardly work with quadratic voting (each person just has multiple vote-points). I haven’t thought enough about how “proportional” allocation would work with ranked-choice votes.
And yep, donating more to that fund won’t get you additional votes.