Change Log

Serial Approval Vote Election (SAVE)

A new voting system for finding consensus

Change log:

15-Jan-2026, version 0.2.2

Minor change to stylesheet load. Removed title property.

Syntax corrections to css/SAVE-site.css. Put actual comment markers around a comment. Got rid of an empty @media clause and a stray comment terminator.

The net effect of these changes restores the pale green background for multiple explorables, specifically SAVE Basics, SAVE Focus, SAVE Voters, Voronoi IRV, Voter Metrics, and Aggregation.

Normalized css and js link inclusions to be relative. More specifically: changed "/css/*" to "css/*", and "/js/*" to "js/*".

1-Jan-2026, version 0.2.1

Bug fix for new Arrow's theorem page. I forgot to add the new navigation controls to the page. Fixed now.

1-Jan-2026, version 0.2.0

General navigation updates, including hiding navigation behind a three-bar button for narrow screens, and shortening some of the titles. Also, organizing navigation into four conceptual sections, and making sure all pages are directly reachable from the top navigation menu.

Previous pages, now reachable from the top navigation menu:

Preference Profiles: A simple explorable for preference profiles over \(2\) to \(5\) motions, with all strict preference orders possible (no ties). The explorable generate uniform random voter counts for each preference order, then calculates the pairwise majority decision results, the Copeland scores, and shows the resulting tournament. Now directly reachable.
Spatial Models: A simple explorable for a spatial model in a 2-D Euclidean metric context. Now directly reachable.
Tournaments: A simple explorable for tournaments, with between \(2\) to \(12\) motions, controllable probabilities for wins, ties, and losses, controls to edit the tournament pairwise results, and the resulting Copeland scores. Now directly reachable.
Voronoi IRV: A simple explorable using a Voronoi diagram, in which the area of a region corresponds to the percentage of the vote. The motions can be added, moved, or deleted, then you can step through the round-by-round results for an honest IRV result. Now directly reachable.

Several new pages, including:

Arrow's Theorems: Description and commentary on Arrow's "Possibility Theorem for Two Alternatives", and "General Possibility Theorem" (also known as "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" (AIT).
Cell Tower: A story about a working democracy dealing with multiple possible outcomes in a small scale setting. This is an example of a functioning democracy.
Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem: Description and commentary on the "Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem" (GST).
Not Impossible: Commentary on why a good voting system can exist without running afoul of either AIT or GST.
What Is SAVE?: An introductory page for the four main SAVE pages.
SAVE Chart: A page with Drakon flow charts for SAVE.
Simulated Electorates: An introductory page for the three basic models used in simulating electorates for voting theory, with most of the attention given to spatial models.
Why SAVE?: An introductory page for the Cell Tower, Not Impossible, Arrow's Theorems, and Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem pages.

Updates to pages:

Home: Updated for the new site organization and pages.
All Models: Updated for the new SAVE Focus explorable, and some updates to the descriptions of the explorables.
SAVE Focus: Now has an explorable that explicitly details how the next focus motion is determined.

Updates to CSS styles:

Styles for Hide/Show blocks: The CSS styles for the hide/show blocks have been updates so tabbing through the page will indicate when the focus is on a header section that can be toggled to hide or show its content.
Styles for description lists: The CSS styles for description lists have been made consistent across the various pages.
Styles for footnotes: The CSS styles for footnotes have been made consistent across the various pages.

Renamed files: underline to hyphens, down-case all file names

except the ones starting with SAVE. This includes:

[X] A arrows_theorems_critique.org -> arrows-theorems-critique.org
[X] E Simulated_Electorates.org -> simulated-electorates.org
[X] G gibbard_satterthwaite_theorem_critique.org -> gibbard-satterthwaite-theorem-critique.org
[X] N not_impossible.org -> not-impossible.org
[X] P Simulated_Profiles.org -> simulated-profiles.org
[X] S Simulated_Spatial.org -> simulated-spatial.org
[X] T Simulated_Tournaments.org -> simulated-tournaments.org
[X] V Voronoi-IRV.org -> voronoi-irv.org

14-Oct-2025, version 0.1.5

Aggregation explorable:

Changed the title to "Aggregation of Voter Ideals (in 2D)".

Extended the simulation controls reference to include all the controls.

Added text sections on:

Details on electorate creation
Details on the various display options
Things to look for in this simulation

Added distance descent line and path options, similar to the gradient descent line and path options, but using a different method to find the best result.

Fixed bug in gradient definition. The broken version normalized gradients to 1 unit in the desired direction instead of recognizing the variability in the strength of the pull (the length of the vectors).

Fixed bug in the initial caption. The problem was the initial caption originated from a different explorable. The new initial caption is more appropriate to the aggregation.

6-Sep-2025, version 0.1.4

Redo navigation to focus on SAVE.

Added an about page.

Added an all-models page as a short-cut to all the models.

Updated home/landing page to focus on SAVE.

Updated pages and code to use proper Minkowski symbols. (The power is a superscript, and when weights are used, there is a subscript of w.

Major updates to text of SAVE basics,

Major updates to text of Voter metrics,

14-Aug-2025, version 0.1.3

Renamed SAVE-01 to SAVE-basics and SAVE-02 to SAVE-voters, to better accommodate the new SAVE-focus.

Added new Explore SAVE Focus page. Currently only text describing the rules. Plan is to add a simulation to allow folks to play with the rules and see how things work and why they are as they are now.

Added body tags to any pages that were missing them. This allows better CSS compartmentalization.

Updated the initial caption in the Spatial Models explorable to more clearly explain why I chose a cycle to be the first spatial depiction of an electorate.

Fixed, or at least improved, indentation on description list items.

3-Aug-2025, version 0.1.2

Updated text for most of the earlier pages, switching from "alternatives" to "motions" mostly, but other changes as well, trying to be more consistent and accurate.

Further propagation of that last flag. which had caused some explorables to fail in odd ways.

Added an average voter-motion distance metric to the Mandate table in SAVE reports.

28-Jul-2025, version 0.1.1

I forgot a new flag that needed to be in all my more recent explorables, but I didn't back-port far enough, so my spatial model explorable was quite happily updating its model, but it just wasn't displaying the new positions of the motions and voters. Fixed now. sigh… (But at least I'm getting practice with updating the site. :-)

28-Jul-2025, version 0.1.0

Added the SAVE Voters explorable.

1-Jul-2025, version 0.0.9

This early version of the site is aimed at voting theorists: 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. The initial eight simulations (explorables) are: tournaments, preference profiles, spatial models, IRV using Voronoi diagrams, SAVE basics, Voter metrics, and aggregation.