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Paul Cohen
At: /pcohen

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Attended college thanks to the generous state support of education in 1960's America. Earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Illinois followed by post doctoral research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Taught for several years at Lehigh University prior to a short stint at Bell Laboratories but followed by a much longer career at NEC punctuated by ten U.S. and international patents in the general area to semiconductor applications. Now living in a comfortable Maine retirement community and focused on the prospect of upgrading democracy by means of an improved voting system.

OpEd News Member for 926 week(s) and 5 day(s)

130 Articles, 30 Quick Links, 1454 Comments, 12 Diaries, 3 Series, 8 Polls

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Family, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Monday, March 11, 2024
Families of Voting Systems Just because two voting systems use the same ballots does not mean they are the same. How the votes are counted and how the winner is determined are equally important. This article describes such variations of balanced approval voting.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views), Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views)
... or the highway, From Uploaded
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, February 25, 2024
Illusions of Ending the Two-Party Duopoly If ending the two-party duopoly is what we want to accomplish then the options for a new voting system seem quite limited.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views), Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views)
Local Election Ballot #ds444, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(5 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Can We Reform our Polarized Two-Party Politics? There are many reasons to favor balanced approval voting, and high on the list is that it would give voters more candidates to choose from. This purpose here is to consolidate the most important advantages of this voting system within a single article.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
Electoral-College_DEC2020_1045, From FlickrPhotos
(6 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Is BAV Compatible with the Electoral College? The Electoral College now seems an anachronism, but it is enshrined in the Constitution and seems very hard to eliminate. This article suggests a couple of ways to improve matters without resorting to eliminating it.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
Water cooler discussions, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, January 2, 2024
Top-down Bias in Podcasting Technological changes can cause cultural problems that require us to adapt. It may be impossible to return to what worked in the past and so new solutions may be needed. Polarization and the consequent limitations on civil discussions may in part be a consequence of social media. It seems impossible for us to eliminate social media but here we suggest another way to bring back civil discussions of important issues.
Balanced Approval Voting, From Uploaded
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, December 28, 2023
Bottom-up Electoral Reform This article is really a plea for help with spreading the word about BAV. There are a few people who support this method of voting but that number is now quite small compared to the number who are completely unaware of it. So long as that is true, it will not even be a candidate for adoption. Changing that will not be easy, but the article proposes a strategy.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Friday, December 15, 2023
Less Democracy Should Not Be an Option A podcast discusses the wisdom of returning to smoke-filled rooms (well, maybe no cigars) to decide on nominations for our leaders. Here we argue that there are better alternatives.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
Spoiled-Elections, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(21 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, November 30, 2023
Do IRV Voters Just Need Training? Revised to fix tables: A second example is presented of an IRV election being subjected to the spoiler effect. This second example does not depend on the odd handling of abstentions in IRV elections.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views), Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views)
Rube Goldberg%27s %22Self-Operating Napkin%22 %28cropped%29., From WikimediaPhotos
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, November 5, 2023
Spoiled Again The major selling point for ranked-choice voting has always been that it avoids the spoiler effect. This is shown by example. Here we show a different example of a ranked-choice election in which the spoiler effect does happen.
Series: Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views), Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
Atlanta Womens March John Lewis., From WikimediaPhotos
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, October 19, 2023
Good Strategic Voting IRV is such a complex voting system it might seem that strategic voting simply could not happen. But this article shows that it could become a concern.
Series: Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views), Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
Apples & Oranges - There is no comparison, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(17 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Comparing BAV with Ranked Choice Voting Compared to BAV, ranked-choice voting asks much more of voters. And it puts much more effort into evaluating the responses, so it is not unreasonable to ponder whether all that extra effort is justified.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views), Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views)
Donald J. Trump at Marriott Marquis NYC September 7th 2016, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, September 3, 2023
How Did Trump Ever Win? Trump owes his nomination in 2016 to plurality voting. This is not news to anyone who has followed this series of articles, but it is a message that is worth repeating. The real purpose of this article is to gather into one short article the important reasons for favoring balanced approval voting.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)
Electric Meters, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Why Bother to Meter Electric Power? Qui Bono? Who profits from charging end customers for electric power usage? It is the producers of power who produce that electric power by burning fossil fuels. So why peruse policies that perpetuate this approach?
Series: Electricity Delivery Charges (4 Articles, 10642 views)
Desert Factory, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, July 20, 2023
Taking Advantage (of a Foolish Electrical Billing Policy) This is a fictional illustration of what might go wrong as a result of charging for delivery of each KWH of electric power.
Series: Electricity Delivery Charges (4 Articles, 10642 views)
Spoiler for Condorcet, From Uploaded
(3 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Saturday, July 8, 2023
Condorcet and the Spoiler Effect This article follows up on a misstatement in the previous article and explores some implications. In particular, it makes some comparisons between several different voting systems and approches to comparing their merits.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views), Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views)
Power lines, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Electrical Delivery: The Poor and the Elderly Will Pick Up the Tab The second article in this series shows that because of the way electric bills are now computed, the natural evolution will be for rising prices paid mostly by the poor and the elderly. This argues for a change in how the bills are computed.
Series: Electricity Delivery Charges (4 Articles, 10642 views)
confuse, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Sunday, June 4, 2023
Balanced Condorcet Voting Can Condorcet voting be balanced? There is a way, but it seems confusing and probably not worth applying in real elections. But observations about ranked voting and about Condorcet voting are also found in the article
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views), Ranked Voting (35 Articles, 43609 views)
scrooge-mcduck-make-it-rain, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(1 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, May 25, 2023
Coping with Big Wealth Trying to tax away concentrations of great wealth is politically difficult and historically it does not seem to work. Here, we suggest a possible alternative.
Power Lines, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(4 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Perverse Delivery Charges "Delivery" seems to take on a variety of meanings, but we are often charged for it. This article examines what this entails, but particularly for electric power.
Series: Electricity Delivery Charges (4 Articles, 10642 views)
Star-Forming Region NGC 3603, From CreativeCommonsPhoto
(2 comments) SHARE More Sharing        Friday, March 17, 2023
Star Voting on Fabric Star voting has attracted some attention recently. A short video on the subject led me to think about this system and this article sketches a few thoughts about it.
Series: Balanced Voting (97 Articles, 120824 views)

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