EM agenda?

[Steve Eppley]

Our list has been quiet awhile.  Here are some agenda items still
open.  (If I've forgotten some, or if you want to append more, let
us know.)

1. Single Winner Committee vote.
To the best of my knowledge, only two ballots have been cast: 
Mike O's and mine.  Kevin said a couple weeks ago he's planning to
vote.  Lucien told me he's not going to vote since he hasn't been
following all the details of the discussion.  All EM subscribers are
welcome to vote, but no one else has expressed a desire to vote.

When Mike launched this vote, he said he'd wait until 7 days with
no additional ballots had elapsed before concluding the poll is
over.  That sounded fair to me, and no one objected.  By my reckoning,
it has been more than 7 days without any more votes cast so I think 
that if Mike went ahead with his "threat" he'd be justified.  If 
anyone wishes to vote, better do so asap.

Before posting the poll results to the ER list, we'll submit the
draft message here to see if anyone wants to edit it, and hopefully
we can achieve consensus that the message accurately summarizes our
points of view (both what we agree on and what we disagree on).

2. FAQs for single-winner methods and prop rep methods 
I feel a strong desire to set up my webspace with such FAQs and
commentary, and send them to people I think should know more about 
electoral reforms, so I hope we can pursue this soon.

Perhaps EM subscribers will help by compiling a list of messages 
already posted which they each think are important.  Mainly their 
own, of course... :-)  Then we can merge these lists, and those of 
us who are inspired to write will write.

3. Responses from Bruce?
Bruce A wrote that he's willing to defend Regular-Champion's winners, 
but for the last couple of weeks he's been silent.  I'd like to see his 
response to Regular-Champion's "rich party problem," which has also 
been expressed as a couple of related criteria (Independence from 
Twins, Independence from Co-partisan Alternatives).

I'm also eager to see Bruce's references regarding why academics don't
consider Rated Ballot methods (where voters can rate the candidates
such as on a -10 to +10 scale).  I recall he said that someday he
hoped to find time to post this.  I'm also subscribed to
singlewinner at deliberate.com (a tiny maillist which serves to guide
the development of eVote, online voting software) where none of the
other subscribers pay attention to me when I try to explain why Rated
Ballot methods are too prone to voter manipulation; having some
references would help me convince the eVote developers to properly
support ranked ballot tallying algorithms.  It's my hope that many 
people will learn by using eVote or other online software how 
democratic elections ought to be run--this would help the electoral 
reform movement and also facilitate experiments with direct democracy.

---Steve     (Steve Eppley    seppley at alumni.caltech.edu)