SAVE Home page
Serial Approval Vote Election (SAVE)
A new voting system for finding consensus
Imagining a New Voting System
Have you ever considered our voting system and thought: "I don't want to pick someone to represent me. I want to tell my representatives, whomever they may be, what I want them to do." Have you ever just wanted your voice to be heard by your elected officials? Have you ever thought the system is broken? If you have, you are not alone.
There are two key phrases that often come up when we think about breakages in the system: the will of the people, and the consent of the governed. The phrases sound great, but problem with them is operational. How is the will of the people determined? How do the governed give their consent? Historically, discontent and protests are signs of not doing the will of the people, and when the governed do not consent, there is resistance, rebellion, and eventually revolution if things go too far.
Personally, I would rather things did not go too far, so I designed a collective choice procedure to actually determine the will of the people and allow the governed to explicitly consent, or withdraw that consent as needed.
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An example information block ,,fold,,
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Serial Approval Vote Election:
Serial Approval Vote Election (SAVE), is a newly designed method of implementing collective choice and massively multi-party negotiation. It differs from most other methods by using multiple voting rounds to gradually determine the collective balance point. Dividing the election process into multiple rounds and extending it over time enables SAVE to go beyond the limitations of some small set of predetermined motions by identifying the best of those initial motions, and improving upon them.
A good way to quickly get a sense of SAVE is to see it in action.
SAVE basics - Motion Addition, Not Deletion ,,fold,,
The SAVE basics explorable shows a simple scenario in which a community of \(100\) voters need to find a good location for a central resource where the utility of the resource to each individual voter depends only on the distance between the resource location and the voter's ideal location.
This explorable provides an introduction to Serial Approval Vote Election (SAVE). This is a radical departure from other, prior voting systems because it uses multiple rounds to converge on the final result, and takes full advantage of the multiple round to add new motions during the process instead of deleting existing motions.
Click on this link: SAVE basics to open the explorable.
Explorables for Voter Metrics, and Preference Aggregation ,,fold,,
These next two explorables are not strictly about SAVE, or any other voting method. The Voter metrics explorable looks at a representation of a voter as a location in an issue space of a voter's ideal position, and includes three motions, also represented as positions. The voter prefers motions closer to its ideal, and what "closer" means is the subject of the explorable.
The Aggregation explorable allows you to explore how multiple voter preferences combine, and how to find the best possible collective choice in the very unrealistic case where all preference information is known. The reason behind this explorable is to have a basis for comparing voting systems in a controlled environment where you can see how close the results are to the best possible collective choice.
Voter metrics: taxicab, Euclidean, and Chebyshev, +/- Weights ,,fold,,
The SAVE basics explorable is limited in that the provided electorates are fixed at \(100\) voters and use an unweighted Euclidean metric for their preferences. There are many other possible metrics of which six are generally available in later SAVE explorables.
The Voter metrics explorable shows a single voter and \(3\) motions, and is configured to allow any of the four items to be moved. The general idea is to show how the different metrics affect voter preference orders.
Click on this link: Voter Metrics to open the explorable.
Voter Preference Aggregation ,,fold,,
While the Voter metrics explorable shows how changes to the active metric can change voter preference orders, this Aggregation explorable lets you look at whole electorates and see how individual voter preferences combine to reinforce and / or oppose the preferences of other voters. In particular, it lets you find an optimal motion that minimizes voter dis-satisfaction with the result.
It also lets you pick a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG), allowing you to recreate a specific electorate or share the generation instructions with others, so they can re-create them on their own devices.
What is most significant about the Aggregation explorable is it uses its simulation data to calculate the best possible motion for the electorate as a whole.
Click on this link: Aggregation to open the explorable.
More SAVE Explorables ,,fold,,
The next two explorables look at one core aspect of SAVE (selecting the next focus motion), and one rather major unknown factor with SAVE (voter behavior). .
SAVE focus selection ,,fold,,
The SAVE focus explorable is currently UNDER CONSTRUCTION. The intent is to allow you to look at different ways of selecting the focus for the next round when there are multiple options.
The process for selecting the focus is strictly deterministic, and perhaps not immediately obvious. The focus selection procedure is specified, and various alternate methods that were tried along the way are also presented to justify the current method. (Note: the alternate methods will be included in the explorable, but are not yet listed.)
The current page, while not an explorable, does list and explain the rules the other SAVE explorables use for focus selection.
These rules are necessary for SAVE to work properly, and I hope understanding them will help you understand SAVE and consider whether you might want to use it in some collective choice decisions.
Click on SAVE Focus to open the page.
SAVE voter behavior ,,fold,,
The SAVE voters explorable deals with the behavior of the voting agents in the simulation, and as such is speculative. Real voters have choices in any election, ranging from "do I participate at all?", through "how should I fill out my ballot?", and ultimately "do I accept the outcome?", and "do I trust the process?".
SAVE adds additional choices: "should I propose a new motion?", "what new motion should I propose?, and "do I want the process to stop now?".
As it runs, the simulation code has to answer most of the questions for each voter. It does so using configurable parameters, and this explorable lets you play with them. (The questions not directly addressed relate to participation, acceptance, and trust. The are not addressed simply because these voter agents are limited simulations. It is my expectation that actual collective choice trials using SAVE will answer some of these important questions.)
Technically, explorable combines the fundamentals of SAVE basics with the electorate flexibility of Aggregation and adds controls for simulating voter behavior in order to explore how SAVE functions in various theoretical conditions.
Click on SAVE Voters to open the page. .
Index of all models ,,fold,,
There are a few other models, simulations, and explorables on this site, most notably a set of three models for different starting points for looking at voting, and a closer look at instant runoff voting (IRV).
Click on all models to open the page.
Questions? Comments?
To send us email: save-info@serialapprovalvoteelection.org
Like SAVE itself, this website is part of an iterative process. This is version 0.1.4 of the web site. More changes still to come. (–tec, 6-Sep-2025)