SAVE Home page

It is still early for this site (version 0.1.3, 14-Aug-2025), but we're getting there. This version is still aimed at voting theorists: i.e. people who have taken close looks at exactly how we vote, and how the exact systems we use to vote can help or hinder our democracies.

Much of the discussion about voting theory is limited to static pages that depend on the readers' ability to visualize systems and their behavior. My intent with this site is to provide dynamic simulations to let readers interact with the various systems, explore their behavior and gain a deeper understanding of some very fundamental aspects of democracy.

Note: This site was developed using a browser frame about 6 inches wide and 12 inches tall. It has not been optimized for either phones or large screens.

Tournaments

This explorable shows a bit about what can and cannot be done with tournaments. They may be useful as an output method, but they do not provide much information about the input to the process.

Preference Profiles

This explorable shows a bit about what can and cannot be done with preference profiles. Every preference profile can be used to generate a tournament, but the mapping is many-to-one.

Spatial Models

This explorable shows a bit about what can and cannot be done with spatial models. While preference profiles provide the information required to derive their tournaments, spatial models provide the information needed to generate preference profiles. At this level, we start to model why voters vote the way they do.

IRV and Voronoi

This explorable uses a Voronoi diagram to illustrates what goes on during the counting phase of Instant Run-off Voting (IRV, also sometimes Rank choice voting). Recent efforts have managed to get IRV used in some elections, and while it is under some circumstances better than plurality or first-past-the-post voting, it falls far short of an ideal voting system. (At least in my opinion.)

SAVE Basics

This explorable provides an introduction to Serial Approval Vote Election (SAVE). This is a somewhat radical departure from other 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 eliminating existing motions.

Voter Metrics

This explorable provides an introduction to some of the various metrics that can be used in the simulations. Every explorable up to this point has used either no metrics at all or the basic Euclidean metric. This simulation presents both unweighted and weighted versions of the Euclidean metric, the city block or taxicab metric, and the Chebyshev metric.

Aggregation

This explorable looks at the question of what the best result actually should be. The question is impossible to answer in the real world because it takes too much effort to gather the information and it is not unusual for voters to claim different preferences. However, in these simulations all the data is right there. The idea behind this explorable is if we can justify a "best" result, or even a "better" result, we can use that objective result to sort voting systems by their performance, and use that information to pick a better one.

SAVE Focus

UNDER CONSTRUCTION - This explorable looks at how the next focus is determined in Serial Approval Vote Election (SAVE). 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.

SAVE Voters

This 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.

To send us email: save-info@serialapprovalvoteelection.org

Like SAVE itself, this website is part of an iterative process. This is version 0.1.3 of the web site. More changes still to come. (–tec, 14-Aug-2025)