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 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).