Was digging around approval voting adjacent voting systems, and I happened across this paper on arxiv:
[2006.00368] Evaluating the Properties of a First Choice Weighted Approval Voting System (arxiv.org)
It describes a voting system that can be tuned with a hyperparameter “k.” Depending on the value you choose for k, the system can have different properties that appeal for different situations. The most obvious application for catalyst governance seems to be the improvement they made over bare bones approval voting (1 <= k < 1 + 1/n) where n is the number of voters. This gives the same exact winner as approval in the event of a single winner but can also break ties otherwise. k being greater than n gives a similar result for first past the post voting, but that relies on the assumption that first choices will remain the same in both systems (which is a rather weak assumption in my book). Other values of k, like k > c ensure pareto-efficient outcomes.
This seems worth consideration if we are interested in using approval voting adjacent methods for governance, but there are a plethora of wildly different options as well. Unfortunately, Arrow’s impossibility theorem means that we’ll have to pick the compromises we are most comfortable with.
What do you all think? Has the community picked a voting system to coalesce around yet?