(Note: Although this will contain a reference to a thing that is happening in Google I have no inside knowledge here and have not talked to the team at all. I know literally no more about this than is present in the linked article)

A couple of days ago I saw a link to this article about how Google ventures are making decisions that avoid the group think of brain storming.

It’s a good system, and well thought out. Basically everyone proposes a couple options and then everyone votes on all the options. I should like this, right? I like voting.

And I mostly do like this. From a psychology and meeting design point of view it’s very well thought out.

Of course, from a voting theory point of view… Well they’re using first past the post.

That’s not to single them out. If you’re doing things by hand, basically everyone uses first past the post. The tallying process is really easy. Some people will use approval voting (same as FPTP, but you can vote for multiple things), which is a big step up, but can we do better?

When we chose our kittens’ names we voted on the sets of names we had using Majority Judgement. This worked really well, and we were rather happy with the end result (our kittens are named Sinister and Dexter), but it’s relatively easy to tally Majority Judgement by hand when you only have three voters. For a larger meeting that’s not going to work so well.

Or is it?

There’s a variant on Majority Judgement that it turns out is quite easy to do by hand. It’s called Majority Gauge. In result it differs from Majority Judgement only in that it can occasionally tie when Majority Judgement would determine a clear winner. This should happen rarely enough that you can just not worry about it and resolve ties however you otherwise would have.

It works as follows:

Everyone casts their vote. A vote consists of assigning a grade from a fixed list of grades. e.g. “Hate / Indifferent / Like”. You can use as many as you want, but to keep this simple for hand tallying you probably want three (it doesn’t get much more complicated with more, but the actual process of counting things up gets more annoying).

For each candidate you count how many votes of each grade each candidate got. Here’s a made up example based on our kitten name choices with three grades and five voters (we actually had 5 grades and 3 voters):

Name	Hate	Indifferent	Like
Sinister and Dexter	0	2	3
Gin and Tonic	2	1	2
Lorem and Ipsum	0	3	2
Kappa and Lambda	2	2	1
Terror and Erebus	0	5	0

The grade is calculated as follows: First you calculate a threshold. This is half the number of voters, rounded down. In this case that’s 2. You now want to find the lowest score that’s supported by at least that many people.

To do this you count from the worst score to the highest, adding up as you go until you exceed the threshold. You then stop and give the candidate that grade. So for the above example, “Gin and Tonic” and “Kappa and Lambda” get a grade of “Hate”, while “Sinister and Dexter”, “Lorem and Ipsum” and “Terror and Erebus” each get a grade of “Indifferent”.

Now every option which didn’t get the top grade gets out. A lot of the time this will leave you with only one option. In this case we get three (in our actual kitten voting we had two, but I needed to fiddle with this to make it a good example).

For each of these candidates we now mark it positive or negative. It’s positive if it has strictly more votes better than its grade than less than its grade. For this example, “Sinister and Dexter” and “Lorem and Ipsum” are both positive, whileas “Terror and Erebus” is negative (because ties are resolved in favour of negative).

This has two effects: Firstly, if any are positive then all the negative ones drop out of the race. Again, if this leaves you with only one option left you stop whether you’re done.

It also matters because it decides how the final round is conducted. There are two options:

If the candidates remaining are positive ones, the final round is counted by counting up the number of votes each candidate got that was greater than their grade. The highest scorer wins. So “Sinister and Dexter” get a score of 2 and “Gin and Tonic” gets a score of 1, leaving our kittens named “Sinister and Dexter”. They’re so relieved.

If on the other hand all remaining candidates are negative, you reverse this. Instead you count up how many votes they got which were lower than their grade, and the candidate with the fewest votes wins.

(In both these cases, if the scores are tied then so is the election).

And that’s pretty much it. It’s a bit fiddly, and you probably wouldn’t want to actually run it without some notes on how to do so until you’d done it a few times, but it should be entirely doable by hand.

Obviously I think this is a good idea, but I don’t have a lot of practical evidence. It would be interesting to see meetings adopt more nuanced voting systems and whether this actually improves the decisions made.

From the facebook thread for my last post:

Jon Pretty replied with:

I’m not going to vote. The expected utility of me voting is infinitesimal. In the unlikely scenario that my vote decides the election, it will change just a single representative. What practical difference does that make? Virtually nothing. Sure, the turnout will be one vote higher, but that’s even less relevant.

If I believed voting was useful, I’d play the lottery; one where I’m even less likely to win, and where the winnings are small enough that they wouldn’t change my life in any noticeable way.

People sometimes ask me “what if everyone thought like that?” Well, they don’t, and I rely on that fact, so I’m not going to encourage everyone to think like me. If more people did think like me, I’d think differently and I’d start voting, because my vote might actually have more chance of making a difference then.

[…]

And my reply:

The basis of modern civilization is lots of people doing things that have no strong net benefit to them that on aggregate make things better for everyone. e.g. for a trivial example, the net effect of not littering is small, but the aggregate effect of even a relatively small percentage of the population littering is large. Choosing to opt out of those small things because you trust other people to pick up your trash for you is a selfish attitude which I can not allow to spread.

And the thing is, you think you’re being unique with your “What if everyone thought like that? Well they don’t”. They do. You’re not even in a minority here – electoral turnout for the EU elections is generally completely pathetic in the UK. About 65% of the population didn’t vote in the EU elections last time.

And this turnout is not uniformly distributed. Extremists are more likely to vote than non-extremist, so your wishy washy “I’m not going to vote because it doesn’t make a difference” bullshit is basically you participating in the statistics of handing power to awful people. Sure your individual contribution to it is infinitesimal, but your attitude of apathy is the same as most of the others responsible, and by both practising and promoting that attitude you are selfishly making the world a worse place.

So, in short, yes I’m going to fucking judge you for not voting. Go vote.

Your Russell Brand studied “Oh but I’m not allowed to be special so why bother” political apathy does not impress me. Go fucking vote.

Hello everyone. I’m here in Zurich. I’m not dead. At some point when the dust has settled I will post about that, but this is not that post.

What this post is is reminder that if you live in the UK and entitled to vote then you should be voting in your local and MEP elections tomorrow (that is, the 22nd of May. Thursday). It’s important.

(If you’re not in the UK but are eligible to vote then ideally you should be voting too – e.g. I’ve asked my sister to vote as my proxy – but this notice comes too late for you)

If you have no idea how to vote, honestly you will probably still be a net benefit if you pick a random one of the main three parties. You shouldn’t do that, but it’s at least a better option than not voting (I’m not a big fan of the status quo, but I’m a bigger fan of the status quo than I am of UKIP, who are polling distressingly well). If you want to spend 5 minutes of your time on figuring out how to vote in the european elections instead of flipping a coin, votematch will give you a decent idea of which of the parties running will best support your preferences.

(It’s much harder to figure out how to vote in the local elections because a lack of good information caused by everyone pretending they’re not important. My general policy is to have my local vote follow my general politics).

For myself, I’m voting green in everything. They’re basically the most left wing of all our parties who are in with a chance, and you might have picked that up about my politics.

(It’s unclear that this is the perfect decision from a tactical point of view, but it’s not a bad idea from a tactical point of view – the greens have historically done well in local elections, and their polling in the MEP elections is decent enough that I think they’ve got a chance – and I think there are secondary benefits to increasing the Green’s vote share by making them seem like more plausible candidates in future elections)

Obviously if you just want to follow my lead and vote along with me like the good loyal audience you are, that’d be grand, but really you shouldn’t do that. Spend a little bit of time today making up your mind if you already haven’t, and then go out and vote.

A friend commented on facebook (and rightly so) that the list of MEP candidates in London was very distorted in favour of getting us out of Europe. I pointed out that the MEP electoral system we used was vulnerable to vote splitting (it has to be: You only get to vote for one party), so in some sense this was a good thing (although I hate to celebrate bad voting systems).

But it made me realise that I’m actually incredibly unclear as to what the voting system for our MEPs is. It turns out that I’m not alone. The available literature is terrible. It’s scattered, hard to find and poorly explained. This is my attempt to make sense of it. You might want to just go read the wikipedia page instead, as it’s actually pretty good, but I was most of the way through finishing this when I found that particular page and decided I might as well keep doing the research. These are my research notes.

Note that this is UK specific, though the details are not unique to us in that a lot of other EU countries use similar systems. The EU imposes various restrictions on the voting systems used. It requires that the system be a form of proportional representation, and provides some bounds on what sort of proportional representation, but it does not mandate a specific form. It also allows for countries to be divided up into constituencies who each use a form of proportional representation (it is unclear to me what would happen if a country wanted to subdivide into constituencies of one member each and use FPTP in each of them. This would obviously be extremely non-proportional). Most countries don’t, but some do.

So step one is that there are 12 constituencies in the UK. Each of these elect multiple MEPs, with a different number for each constituency. Note that these constituencies do not map directly onto the constituencies for electing your MP – they are much larger. I’m unclear on whether some of the normal electoral constituencies cross multiple MEP constituencies but I don’t think they do (EDIT: Alex Foster confirms in the comments that they don’t).

The regions and number of MEPs are as follows:

• Eastern – 7
• East Midlands – 5
• London – 8
• North East – 3
• North West – 8
• South East – 10
• South West – 6
• West Midlands – 7 (NOTE: This is one more than last time, apparently due to the Lisbon Treaty. The last election was rerun with the original counts to make up the difference when this change came into effect)
• Yorkshire and Humber – 6
• Wales – 4
• Scotland – 6
• Northern Ireland – 3

So there are 73 UK MEPs in total (up from 72).

(Source)

How these MPs are then elected varies by constituency. Every constituency other than Northern Ireland uses the D’Hondt method. Northern Ireland uses STV.

…or at least that’s what seems to be said all over the place, e.g. in the gov.uk page about voting systems, but the guidance for returning officers paper makes no mention of anything other than D’Hondt. Additionally that’s the only place where I’ve found them to come out and say “We use the D’Hondt method” as opposed to a half-baked and incomplete explanation of it. I’m pretty sure it’s accurate though.

The D’Hondt method is essentially a (supposedly proportional. I haven’t seen the maths that justifies this, but it seems to work out that way in examples) extension of first past the post to multiple members.

It’s a party-list proportional method. What that means is that you vote for parties, not individuals, and each party puts forth a list of candidates. If they get N seats then the top N people on their list get in.

The way it works is that you run as many rounds as you are electing candidates. In each round, a party gets the score equal to the number of votes it got divided by 1 + the number of candidates it has already had elected (so if it has no candidates so far its score is the number of votes it got. If it has one candidate elected already its score is half that, etc). The party with the highest score gets a candidate and you move onto the next round until you’ve elected enough members.

(It appears to be the case that all MEP elections must use either a proportional party list system or an STV system. I am unclear on exactly what “the list system” constitutes here, but it doesn’t appear to be as restrictive as to specify the D’Hondt method given the range of examples described).

Northern Ireland elects its MEPs with the variant of STV it normally uses. It’s a pretty damn good one. The neat feature of it is that it avoids any ambiguity over which votes are transferred (which can affect the result of an election quite significantly) by transferring all votes but at a fractional value. You calculate the number of excess votes for a candidate that should be transferred onwards and distribute that to each vote according to the fraction of the vote it made up (this isn’t the same as distributing it equally amongst each voter being transferred onwards because some of those may already be at reduced value because they were transferred from a previous candidate). This is the Gregory method of STV.

Anyway, this is most of the information I was interested in finding out. If you want to find out a bit more, go read the Wikipedia page I linked.