[realcoopernurse]

Here's a relatively new PR method developed by a grad student at Harvard. It's an interesting twist on STV that avoids the ballot complexity.

https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-explained-129...

I agree with others on this thread that the only solution to gerrymandering is some form of PR. PLACE voting is interesting because it doesn't require a change in the ballot and retains the notion of geographic districts.

[dragonwriter]

Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.

When you are changing how ballots work, this should be unavoidably obvious, even to people who spent the time the change was being debated in a coma or Antarctic research expedition.

Also, STV in small (~5 member) districts gets much improved proportionality from the status quo, keeps geographic districts, and increases the proportion of people with someone representing both their ideology and district simultaneously.

[Sniffnoy]

> Not requiring a change of ballots when you are doing very different things with them is, IMO, a negative traits because it creates a false familiarity.

I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems, though. Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences. And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP. Regardless I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to associate ordinal ballots with STV specifically rather than just, well, what they are, which is a rank-order of preferences, that will get used somehow.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't think that's something you can really do with voting systems

You can sometimes, you can't others.

> Lots of voting systems are based around the same input assumptions, i.e., people are submitting a rank-order of preferences

But FPTP is not based on that input, so changing from FPTP to a more proportional system (many of which rely on that kind of input) provided a clear opportunity to have a clean break without false familiarity.

> And nothing's saying you'd have to switch to PLACE from STV rather than from FPTP.

The false familiarity is FPTP -> PLACE.

[Sniffnoy]

Ah! I misunderstood. You're talking about the possibility of "check one, go by that candidate's endorsed ballot". (Something that could really be added to just about any voting system; I hadn't really considered it as essential to PLACE in particular.) Yeah, that's an interesting point against that feature, then. Hadn't considered that.