The Nonlinear Library EA - Donation Election: how voting will work by Lizka
Nov 14, 2023
05:44
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Donation Election: how voting will work, published by Lizka on November 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
In brief: we'll use a weighted version of ranked-choice voting to determine the winners in the
Donation Election. Every voter will distribute points across candidates. We'll add up the points for all the candidates, and then eliminate the lowest-ranking candidate and redistribute points from voters who had given points to the now-eliminated candidate. We'll repeat that until we have 3 winning candidates; the funding should be allocated in proportion to those candidates' point totals.
Note: this system is subject to change in the next week (I'm adding this provision in case someone finds obvious improvements or fundamental issues). If we don't change it by November 21, though, it'll be the final system, and I currently expect to go with a system that looks basically like this.
What it will look like for voters
As a reminder, only people who had accounts as of 22 October, 2023, will be able to vote. If you can't vote but would like to participate, you can write about why you think people should vote in a particular way, donate to the projects directly, etc.
What it will look like if you can vote:
Get invited to vote and go to a voting portal to begin the process
(We'll probably feature a link on the Frontpage, and you can already
sign up to get notified when voting opens
)
Select candidates you'd like to vote on
You'll be able to select all the candidates, or just the ones you have opinions about[1]
Assign points to the candidates you've selected, based on how you personally would allocate funding across these different projects (paying attention to the relative point ratios)[2]
Write a note about why you voted in that way (optional), and submit!
A rough sketch of these steps (see the footnote[3] for an actual sketch mockup):
Longer explanation: How vote aggregation will work and more on why we picked this voting method
In classical
ranked-choice voting, voters submit a ranking of candidates. When votes are in, the least popular candidate is eliminated in rounds until a winner is declared. After each elimination, voters' rankings are updated with the eliminated candidate removed (meaning if they ranked the candidate first, their ranking moves up), so votes for that candidate are not wasted.[4]
We wanted to track preference strength more than ranked-choice voting allows us to do (i.e. we wanted to incorporate information like "Voter 1 thinks A should get 100x more funding than B" and to prompt people to think through considerations like this instead of just ranking projects), so instead of ranking candidates, we're asking voters to allocate points to all the candidates.
We'll normalize voters' point distributions so that every voter has equal voting power, and then add up the points assigned to each candidate. This will allow us to identify the candidate with the least number of points, which we'll eliminate.[5] Any voters who had assigned points to that candidate will have their points redistributed to whatever else they voted on, keeping the proportions the same (alternatively, you can think of this as another renormalization of the voter's points). If all of a voter's points were assigned to candidates which are now eliminated, we'll pretend that the voter spread their points out equally across the remaining candidates.[6] We'll run this process until we get to the three top candidates.
This should allow us to capture good information about how people would like to distribute the fund while also giving every voter similar power in determining the final outcome without penalizing people for voting for unpopular candidates or the like.
Let us know what you think!
Comment here or feel free to just reach out.
Also, consider exploring the Giving Portal, sharin...
In brief: we'll use a weighted version of ranked-choice voting to determine the winners in the
Donation Election. Every voter will distribute points across candidates. We'll add up the points for all the candidates, and then eliminate the lowest-ranking candidate and redistribute points from voters who had given points to the now-eliminated candidate. We'll repeat that until we have 3 winning candidates; the funding should be allocated in proportion to those candidates' point totals.
Note: this system is subject to change in the next week (I'm adding this provision in case someone finds obvious improvements or fundamental issues). If we don't change it by November 21, though, it'll be the final system, and I currently expect to go with a system that looks basically like this.
What it will look like for voters
As a reminder, only people who had accounts as of 22 October, 2023, will be able to vote. If you can't vote but would like to participate, you can write about why you think people should vote in a particular way, donate to the projects directly, etc.
What it will look like if you can vote:
Get invited to vote and go to a voting portal to begin the process
(We'll probably feature a link on the Frontpage, and you can already
sign up to get notified when voting opens
)
Select candidates you'd like to vote on
You'll be able to select all the candidates, or just the ones you have opinions about[1]
Assign points to the candidates you've selected, based on how you personally would allocate funding across these different projects (paying attention to the relative point ratios)[2]
Write a note about why you voted in that way (optional), and submit!
A rough sketch of these steps (see the footnote[3] for an actual sketch mockup):
Longer explanation: How vote aggregation will work and more on why we picked this voting method
In classical
ranked-choice voting, voters submit a ranking of candidates. When votes are in, the least popular candidate is eliminated in rounds until a winner is declared. After each elimination, voters' rankings are updated with the eliminated candidate removed (meaning if they ranked the candidate first, their ranking moves up), so votes for that candidate are not wasted.[4]
We wanted to track preference strength more than ranked-choice voting allows us to do (i.e. we wanted to incorporate information like "Voter 1 thinks A should get 100x more funding than B" and to prompt people to think through considerations like this instead of just ranking projects), so instead of ranking candidates, we're asking voters to allocate points to all the candidates.
We'll normalize voters' point distributions so that every voter has equal voting power, and then add up the points assigned to each candidate. This will allow us to identify the candidate with the least number of points, which we'll eliminate.[5] Any voters who had assigned points to that candidate will have their points redistributed to whatever else they voted on, keeping the proportions the same (alternatively, you can think of this as another renormalization of the voter's points). If all of a voter's points were assigned to candidates which are now eliminated, we'll pretend that the voter spread their points out equally across the remaining candidates.[6] We'll run this process until we get to the three top candidates.
This should allow us to capture good information about how people would like to distribute the fund while also giving every voter similar power in determining the final outcome without penalizing people for voting for unpopular candidates or the like.
Let us know what you think!
Comment here or feel free to just reach out.
Also, consider exploring the Giving Portal, sharin...