Researching NOTA

[Aaron Wolf]

I'm getting convinced that none-of-the-above (NOTA) is a good thing to have. It basically means that if a majority end up disapproving of a set of candidates, the election doesn't go ahead at all (some backup plan, new election, not getting into that here).

I would LOVE to see research in VSE etc. add this. It can be added to *any* system. IRV+NOTA, SRV+NOTA… there needs to be some modeling of what point a voter would prefer A to B but still disapprove both.

In IRV, the idea is that the NOTA votes are cumulative. It could be explicitly marked, it could be that exhausted ballots count as NOTA. Once the cumulative NOTA reaches a majority of total ballots, the election is cancelled.

In SRV, it would be maybe if the majority of ballots have 0's for the two candidates in the runoff.

Could this be modeled? I want to see if it would really improve things for various systems.

[Aaron Wolf]

An alternative idea for how to use NOTA in SRV (compared to my original post idea):

Require candidates to receive majority-non-zero scores in order to go to the runoff.

Ideally, research / modeling could try both or even other ways to apply NOTA…

I imagine that while NOTA seems to me it would improve IRV, I think there's ways it could make SRV worse or that there are good and bad ways to apply NOTA…