Hi Jameson,

Thank you for your two contributions to ‘Medium’: especially raising the question of ‘minimizing wasted votes’, and recalling how many citizens’ votes are needlessly wasted in North America and the UK. On the assumption that the best representative democracy would not waste any citizen’s vote, I wonder if we might work together to find the best ‘Schelling point’ in this regard?

You say that ‘Wasted votes are those which prefer the “strongest” loser over all the winners’. We agree if this means the quantitative and qualitative waste as defined in the second paragraph of my published article:

We see a citizen’s vote as being wasted quantitatively to the degree that it fails proportionately to add to the voting power of the member in the legislative body whom she has helped to elect. A citizen’s vote is wasted qualitatively when it fails to increase the voting power of the member she sees as most fit for the office, e.g. the one she trusts most to speak, work, and vote as she would herself if she had the time, energy, skills and opportunity to do so. Her vote is partly wasted qualitatively when her vote is instead given to a member who is less valued in this way by her.(see: http://www.jpolrisk.com/legislatures-elected-by-evaluative-proportional-representation-epr-a-new-algorithm/).

If so, that same article in effect argues that the following two related methods are best suited to provide the Schelling points we both seek: Majority Judgment (MJ) for single-winners and Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR) for multi-winners.

For example, MJ’s 6 grades from Excellent to Reject are more meaningful, informative, and discerning, and thus have the advantage over STAR, 3–2–1’ ratings, and IRV’s rankings. Also, MJ (like STAR and 3–2–1) has the advantage over IRV in never eliminating a candidate preferred by more citizens before a winner is found who is preferred (valued) by fewer citizens. At the same time, only MJ guarantees that the winner is the one candidate who is most discerningly seen as the one best qualitatively suited for the office by an absolute majority of the voters (i.e. only up to 50% minus one vote of all voters may still be unavoidably wasted in the above sense).

Similarly, Evaluative Proportional Representation (EPR)’s evaluations are more informative, meaningful, and discerning than SCORE’s numbers or STV’s rankings. Also,

1) EPR’s grading of the candidate is much easier than scoring or ranking them,

2) because counting EPR’s (and STAR’s) simple ballot only requires a person who can add and subtract whole numbers, it is more likely to be easily understood by ordinary voters than IRV or STV, and

3) only EPR enables each citizen to guarantee that her one vote will continue quantitatively and qualitatively to count in the legislature through the weighted vote of the member she has helped to elect (i.e. EPR establishes a clear ‘chain of accountability,” and no citizen’s vote is wasted).

Of course, other issues also remain to be discussed but I hope the above will prompt you to continue our dialogue. For example, I would like to

A) discuss whether Nazis should be allowed to be represented, and

B) explain how an EAPR legislature, while being well ‘attuned to specific interests,’ is also most likely to form a productive working majority (i.e. mimimize ‘polarization, zero-sum politics of spite, narrow bipolar debate, money-driven politics’),

C) explain how EPR’s use of ‘delegation’ is simpler and more efficient in helping to provide the highest available quality of elected candidates than ‘PLACE voting’.

P.S. Please feel free to ask me to send you an appendix which explains how gerrymandering could be most easily nullified. Also, feel free to ask for an improved version of my above mentioned published article.

Best regards,

Steve