This was confusing to me at first. After some thought, I think it's because it's the minimum number of voters needed to be in the top 3. If you can imagine, if there are only 3 seats, in the worst case, all candidates are eliminated until there are only 4 left. 25% would be threshold to be in the top 3. So they start with that threshold to begin with because it's all the candidates really need in the end. I think the idea is this way the system favors surplus distribution over eliminating candidates.
There's different ways of distributing the surplus votes of a candidate that is over the threshold but here's one example: Let's say Candidate A only needs 25% of the vote but more than 25% of voters chose them as their 1st choice. To distribute the surplus votes, they look and see that 50% of Candidate A's voters chose Candidate B as their 2nd choice and 50% chose Candidate C. In this case, half the surplus votes goes to Candidate B and half to Candidate C.
Thanks so much for the question! The share of each vote considered "surplus" depends on how much the candidate wins their seat by. Think of it like this: If your vote was a dollar and you only needed 90 cents to elect your first choice, proportional RCV lets you spend your extra 10 cents on your second choice. That way, everyone’s vote has exactly the same amount of power.
@@fairvotereform We have got to find an easier way to explain this. Most people will find it very confusing and therefore not support it. Also in places where red team or blue team consistently wins, they'll see it as the threat it is against the power they wield, and they won't support it. It is the fairest voting method, but for those who's power rests on the unfairness of our current system, they won't support it, they're not interested in fairness.
While I fully support Rank Choice Voting, I'm going to need a much simpler way to explain this to most the people that I know, or they're not going to understand it.
What I'd probably do is tell them that you'd have small multi-member districts with between 3-5 people who would be elected roughly proportionally using ranked ballots. I agree you'll definitely need to explain single winner RCV first. Multi-winner RCV basically works the same way, except that, first you check if a candidate has gotten to the threshold, then distribute the surplus votes of their voters before eliminating losing candidates and transferring their votes.
CPG Grey did a series of short cartoon videos explaining several different voting methods, still on UA-cam, including a couple of videos on the serious flaws of the first past the post system. Show the ones on the flaws first and almost anyone will carefully watch the others.
Here's how I would explain it, in terms of "voter power" and "ballot piles". The unit of "voter power" is ballots. (Fractional ballots are allowed after redistributing, we'll get to that.) Voter power is used to gain representation/a seat in government. (The "voter power" phrasing keeps a human element through all this, which will help some people not tune out quite as quickly.) ("Piles" are an intuitive way to grasp ratios without getting into numbers or much math.) A candidate with enough ballots (enough "voter power") to cross the win threshold is elected. But we have to redistribute the *extra* voter power, or those voters who pushed "Candidate A" past the win threshold will get no say in their next picks. (We don't want to punish people for picking a really good and popular candidate). "Excess voter power" is calculated as the ballots a candidate received, minus the threshold. All the power they had beyond the threshold can be redistributed. To do that, we shrink each ballot "candidate A" received equally, until the pile of ballots is only "as high" (only as powerful) as the excess power amount. (Equal to the count of their ballots over the threshold). Shrinking the ballots to the equal the remainder like this accounts for all the ballots (voter power) it took to get the seat. This "shrunk pile" of ballots is exactly all of "Candidate A" voters' next preferences, at exactly the strength they should have after "Candidate A"'s win. Once we redistribute these, if any other candidate passed the threshold from our doing this, they also won a seat, and so on like this as far as we can go. If there are no outright winners left to redistribute from, and too many candidates left for the seats, we'll have to start eliminating someone, (just like in musical chairs)... We can start to eliminate the least "voter powered" candidates. And redistribute *all* those ballots at *full strength*, since they have not powered any candidates to wins yet. (These voters are yet to see representation, so to be fair to them, their power will be un-shrunk for now, full strength until you get at least one win.) And we will keep on electing or eliminating candidates until there are exactly as many winners as there were seats to win. Voter power keeps on moving on to non-eliminated candidates, continuing to elect candidates, until the election process is completed. Only after a win does a voter's continuing power in a later round get diminished, as they have already had some of their say, they have already won a candidate and gotten representation. Redistributing voter power in multiple rounds ensures a candidate with well over the needed support doesn't hold back all their voters' ballots from having a next say. (If a bloc of voters double the size of the threshold picks one candidate, their second preferences should be counted enough to win another seat outright, if they have similar enough preferences to fuel another candidate to the win.) Likewise, elimination keeps the process moving and ensures only the top remaining candidates win the last seats. It is not an utterly flawless system, and yet it's pretty well up there in terms of what we can achieve with pretty simple rules. There's a little math to properly count it, but if you put it in terms of voter power you don't really have to crunch numbers to get what's going on. We're just keeping track of which candidate got the most voter power, electing the strong ones first, transferring second preferences, and eliminating the weakest ones as needed to pick the best of who's left. We're also making sure no-one's ballot gets "stuck" in a spot where it's not counting toward some representation (as long as you rank enough candidates to not exhaust the ballot if all your picks get eliminated), and making sure candidates get picked based on the largest support without letting any group of voters dictate more than their fair share of seats. It's about giving voters' choices an expression through the counting process that is as fair and accurate as possible. Proportional ranked choice is pretty good at that.
I have a question about the method to transfer excess ballots from a candidate who has cleared the threshold for election. Which ballots are selected? It makes a difference, because it will be the second choices on the transferred ballots that are counted. One online site (Cambridge, MA) refers to the "Cincinnati Method", which looks like some type of randomizing method to select ballots to transfer. But how is it possible to insure that the second choices on the transferred ballots are representative of their proportions in the total of all ballots for the candidate who has met the threshold? If the second choices on transferred ballots are not representative of that population of ballots, then the results of the election will be skewed. This looks like a potential flaw in proportional RCV.
@@paulwisniewski8328randomly picking ballots is just one option, having all winning ballots continue on at reduced strength is another option. Organizations should pick an option before the election is conducted so the rules of the contest are clear ahead of time. If all ballots would continue at reduced strength, the factor to multiply them by before redistributing is "ballots over the threshold / total ballots". Multiply total ballots a winning candidate holds, then transfer. All the winning ballots continue on to the next round at a reduced collective strength equal to the count of ballots the winning candidate had above the threshold. One can track the strength of each ballot individually in successive rounds (simple but maybe slow to compute all these strengths), or else one can group ballots with identical ranking orders on them, and compute the sum strength of that unique ballot ranking as a group, which is also a way to track sufficient info to transfer all ballots to third and fourth rounds and so on properly.
I assume an org your size tested this video with some folks, so I'm surprised this is the result. You lost me for awhile until the purple and orange parties were reintroduced. Even then I had questions.
I strongly support proportional RCV,. This however, is a very poor explanation beginning with your grouping Plum, Violet and Lavender as "Purple" and Rust and Apricot as "Orange". You failed to explain that 25% is the threshold because only three candidates can get over 25%. Finally you failed to explain how the excess votes are distributed fairly. OPB gives a much better explanation of Proportional RCV here: ua-cam.com/video/pUC32T7nPVU/v-deo.html
There is no tripling. Single seats are combined into multi-seat districts. The number of Representatives does not change. It would be a little tricky at the Congress level. California or Texas could have multi-seat districts; Wyoming would need to be grouped with other states.
Thank y'all. I live in Missouri and I literally have no voice in Congress. Germany does this best. We should follow.
Thank you!
1:09 What would 25% be needed to win one of three seats, shouldn’t that be 33%?
This was confusing to me at first. After some thought, I think it's because it's the minimum number of voters needed to be in the top 3. If you can imagine, if there are only 3 seats, in the worst case, all candidates are eliminated until there are only 4 left. 25% would be threshold to be in the top 3. So they start with that threshold to begin with because it's all the candidates really need in the end. I think the idea is this way the system favors surplus distribution over eliminating candidates.
How are surplus votes determined?
There's different ways of distributing the surplus votes of a candidate that is over the threshold but here's one example: Let's say Candidate A only needs 25% of the vote but more than 25% of voters chose them as their 1st choice. To distribute the surplus votes, they look and see that 50% of Candidate A's voters chose Candidate B as their 2nd choice and 50% chose Candidate C. In this case, half the surplus votes goes to Candidate B and half to Candidate C.
Thanks so much for the question! The share of each vote considered "surplus" depends on how much the candidate wins their seat by. Think of it like this: If your vote was a dollar and you only needed 90 cents to elect your first choice, proportional RCV lets you spend your extra 10 cents on your second choice. That way, everyone’s vote has exactly the same amount of power.
@@fairvotereform And it's all the votes from the suplus winner spending the ten cents am I correct?
@@ConnorLonergan Yes AND if a candidate with the fewest votes needs to be eliminated (2:30), their "dollar" goes to their second choice.
@@fairvotereform We have got to find an easier way to explain this. Most people will find it very confusing and therefore not support it. Also in places where red team or blue team consistently wins, they'll see it as the threat it is against the power they wield, and they won't support it. It is the fairest voting method, but for those who's power rests on the unfairness of our current system, they won't support it, they're not interested in fairness.
1:28 “Orange would win”-Where is orange? Do you mean plum?
While I fully support Rank Choice Voting, I'm going to need a much simpler way to explain this to most the people that I know, or they're not going to understand it.
Yeah, explaining STV is way easier when people are grounded in RCV first (and there are lots of excellent explainers of that all over youtube)
What I'd probably do is tell them that you'd have small multi-member districts with between 3-5 people who would be elected roughly proportionally using ranked ballots.
I agree you'll definitely need to explain single winner RCV first. Multi-winner RCV basically works the same way, except that, first you check if a candidate has gotten to the threshold, then distribute the surplus votes of their voters before eliminating losing candidates and transferring their votes.
Australia addresses this need by giving each voter a visual explainer card at the voting place.
m.ua-cam.com/video/l8XOZJkozfI/v-deo.html&pp=ygULQ2dwZ3JleSBzdHY%3D
CPG Grey did a series of short cartoon videos explaining several different voting methods, still on UA-cam, including a couple of videos on the serious flaws of the first past the post system. Show the ones on the flaws first and almost anyone will carefully watch the others.
Here's how I would explain it, in terms of "voter power" and "ballot piles". The unit of "voter power" is ballots. (Fractional ballots are allowed after redistributing, we'll get to that.) Voter power is used to gain representation/a seat in government. (The "voter power" phrasing keeps a human element through all this, which will help some people not tune out quite as quickly.) ("Piles" are an intuitive way to grasp ratios without getting into numbers or much math.)
A candidate with enough ballots (enough "voter power") to cross the win threshold is elected. But we have to redistribute the *extra* voter power, or those voters who pushed "Candidate A" past the win threshold will get no say in their next picks. (We don't want to punish people for picking a really good and popular candidate).
"Excess voter power" is calculated as the ballots a candidate received, minus the threshold. All the power they had beyond the threshold can be redistributed.
To do that, we shrink each ballot "candidate A" received equally, until the pile of ballots is only "as high" (only as powerful) as the excess power amount. (Equal to the count of their ballots over the threshold). Shrinking the ballots to the equal the remainder like this accounts for all the ballots (voter power) it took to get the seat.
This "shrunk pile" of ballots is exactly all of "Candidate A" voters' next preferences, at exactly the strength they should have after "Candidate A"'s win.
Once we redistribute these, if any other candidate passed the threshold from our doing this, they also won a seat, and so on like this as far as we can go.
If there are no outright winners left to redistribute from, and too many candidates left for the seats, we'll have to start eliminating someone, (just like in musical chairs)... We can start to eliminate the least "voter powered" candidates. And redistribute *all* those ballots at *full strength*, since they have not powered any candidates to wins yet. (These voters are yet to see representation, so to be fair to them, their power will be un-shrunk for now, full strength until you get at least one win.)
And we will keep on electing or eliminating candidates until there are exactly as many winners as there were seats to win. Voter power keeps on moving on to non-eliminated candidates, continuing to elect candidates, until the election process is completed. Only after a win does a voter's continuing power in a later round get diminished, as they have already had some of their say, they have already won a candidate and gotten representation.
Redistributing voter power in multiple rounds ensures a candidate with well over the needed support doesn't hold back all their voters' ballots from having a next say. (If a bloc of voters double the size of the threshold picks one candidate, their second preferences should be counted enough to win another seat outright, if they have similar enough preferences to fuel another candidate to the win.) Likewise, elimination keeps the process moving and ensures only the top remaining candidates win the last seats.
It is not an utterly flawless system, and yet it's pretty well up there in terms of what we can achieve with pretty simple rules. There's a little math to properly count it, but if you put it in terms of voter power you don't really have to crunch numbers to get what's going on. We're just keeping track of which candidate got the most voter power, electing the strong ones first, transferring second preferences, and eliminating the weakest ones as needed to pick the best of who's left.
We're also making sure no-one's ballot gets "stuck" in a spot where it's not counting toward some representation (as long as you rank enough candidates to not exhaust the ballot if all your picks get eliminated), and making sure candidates get picked based on the largest support without letting any group of voters dictate more than their fair share of seats. It's about giving voters' choices an expression through the counting process that is as fair and accurate as possible. Proportional ranked choice is pretty good at that.
I have a question about the method to transfer excess ballots from a candidate who has cleared the threshold for election. Which ballots are selected? It makes a difference, because it will be the second choices on the transferred ballots that are counted. One online site (Cambridge, MA) refers to the "Cincinnati Method", which looks like some type of randomizing method to select ballots to transfer. But how is it possible to insure that the second choices on the transferred ballots are representative of their proportions in the total of all ballots for the candidate who has met the threshold? If the second choices on transferred ballots are not representative of that population of ballots, then the results of the election will be skewed. This looks like a potential flaw in proportional RCV.
@@paulwisniewski8328randomly picking ballots is just one option, having all winning ballots continue on at reduced strength is another option. Organizations should pick an option before the election is conducted so the rules of the contest are clear ahead of time. If all ballots would continue at reduced strength, the factor to multiply them by before redistributing is "ballots over the threshold / total ballots". Multiply total ballots a winning candidate holds, then transfer. All the winning ballots continue on to the next round at a reduced collective strength equal to the count of ballots the winning candidate had above the threshold.
One can track the strength of each ballot individually in successive rounds (simple but maybe slow to compute all these strengths), or else one can group ballots with identical ranking orders on them, and compute the sum strength of that unique ballot ranking as a group, which is also a way to track sufficient info to transfer all ballots to third and fourth rounds and so on properly.
I assume an org your size tested this video with some folks, so I'm surprised this is the result. You lost me for awhile until the purple and orange parties were reintroduced. Even then I had questions.
In the comments below, please read @MrSmitheroons suggestion to explain this in terms of "voter power" :)
I strongly support proportional RCV,.
This however, is a very poor explanation beginning with your grouping Plum, Violet and Lavender as "Purple" and Rust and Apricot as "Orange". You failed to explain that 25% is the threshold because only three candidates can get over 25%. Finally you failed to explain how the excess votes are distributed fairly. OPB gives a much better explanation of Proportional RCV here: ua-cam.com/video/pUC32T7nPVU/v-deo.html
While I support the voting method....I don't like the idea of tripling the salaries pensions of elected officials.
There is no tripling. Single seats are combined into multi-seat districts. The number of Representatives does not change.
It would be a little tricky at the Congress level. California or Texas could have multi-seat districts; Wyoming would need to be grouped with other states.
This is BS
Promo sm