I would really enjoy staying in touch with people who spend a good number of brain cycles on these topic. What forums or discussion groups would you all recommend?
Ages ago, before I burned out, Election Verification Network (EVN) was really good. Bringing together academics, activists, officials. Very low key, low profile. To avoid the outrage machine.
EVN mostly focused on gear and procedures. Not much overlap with adjacent topics.
I organized an every-partisan election integrity group for a while. We had some small local victories. (Prohibit putting serial number on paper ballot linked to voter ID. Delayed adoption of janky new gear.)
But drift into adjacent issues and coalitions fall apart. For instance: Voter registration databases. Correct answer is universal automatic voter registration where everyone is listed and has an eligibility flag, with audit history. But improving data quality is a no go because of misbelief that higher registration (and participation) has partisan advantage. (Spoiler: It doesn't.)
Another fundamental problem is being outside looking in. Asking the establishment to modify the very system that got them their power is really, really challenging. The vetocracy. That's why all these stupid obvious reforms with +70% support languish. Default answer is always "no", with demands for ever more ridiculous standards of proof, because reasons. This is a fundamental trait of all orgs, groups. Why would the public sphere be any different? Sadly, when change does finally happen, it's disruptive. Punctuated equilibrium vs slow and steady progress.
The Center for Election Science doesn't hide their preference* and advocacy:
> Let’s put approval voting ON THE MAP!
* Generally, each organization has some kind of bias, and I appreciate it when they are up-front about it.
My preferred group would have these biases / goals:
1. Valuing a diverse group of people
2. Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems
3. Valuing understanding among the group members
4. Help group members form alliances with each other, should they desire to organize and do advocacy, because while each of us might have our 'preferred' voting system, we all benefit from moving beyond the 'worst' voting systems
> Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems
This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about voting systems from CGP Grey or Hasan Minhaj and get really passionate, so you get an armchair expertise. Then I think many learn about VSE and see Condorcet methods as the obvious winners (I used to be in this camp). But it often takes awhile to internalize all the nuances in voting. About how to balance VSE, resiliency, simplicity, transparency, computational cost, and more. It is one of those problems that looks easier than it is. A lot of very smart people get into it because it is an interesting problem but it is also easy to convince yourself that your understanding is far better than it is. Every time these threads come up I learn something new and I've been interested in the subject for almost a decade. I think the biggest thing I've learned is to look at the people who have been studying the problem for a long time and see why they are making their decisions. It is difficult to separate the signal from the noise.
In addition to the discord link I also suggest following Clay Shentrup[0]. He's active with Election Science and the co-inventor of STAR (he also typically joins voting threads on HN. Username is his full name). The reason I follow him is because reading his comments and posts have led me to a lot more sources and brought up a lot of the above nuances I didn't understand when I first started getting into the subject.
ranicki: someone on HN claimed that Center for Election Science switched from pushing STAR to pushing approval. is it true that this organization formerly supported STAR, or was it one of the other organizations? I don't remember who was advocating for what
-redacted name-: Center for Election Science has broadly supported cardinal voting methods, score voting and approval voting basically since its inception. From everything I can tell it still is supportive of cardinal methods broadly, but as a political tactic has honed in on approval voting specifically due to its Pareto optimality.
...
-redacted name 2-: I don't think CES ever changed from STAR to approval. IIRC they existed long before STAR was invented
Hmmm... the notion of Pareto optimality is driving political tactics (about what voting method to back)? I know what it means, and it seems strange to me. This suggests that a specialized economic term was used as a motivation for a tactical political decision.
Their forum and Google Group for discussion of voting systems were good resources, but are now being shut down
https://forum.electionscience.org/t/archiving-the-forum-july...
https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience
"This change reflects CES’s gradual evolution from an academic organization to an advocacy organization."
A volunteer-run forum has been created to replace it, but is pretty quiet so far.
http://reddit.com/r/EndFPTP is also a good "non-partisan" resource, as well as https://electowiki.org/wiki/Main_Page