[EM] To Bill Lewis Clark re: stepping-stone

[Eric Gorr]

At 6:40 PM -0500 1/21/04, Dgamble997 at aol.com wrote:
>Mike Ossipoff wrote:
>
>>Is that what happened in Australia? And don't say that IRV hasn't committed
>>its failures in Australia. It wouldn't show up in the data that are recorded
>  >and published.
>
>What are you saying here Mike? That even though you can find none of 
>IRV's failures in recorded and published data you nevertheless KNOW 
>that they are there.

No, he is (I believe) saying that the recorded and published data 
doesn't contain the information needed to demonstrate the problems 
with IRV that are so easily demonstrated with absolute complete 
information about the vote.

If one was to propose a conspiracy, one might be able to claim this 
is a result of a desire by IRV supporters to conceal the truth about 
IRV because their support of IRV is nothing but quasi-religious in 
nature and everyone must submit to their religion.

In truth, it probably has to do with privacy concerns over how an 
actual vote took place. As such, it will be very difficult to 
demonstrate the inherent problems with IRV unless one could find a 
statistically significant and valid and willing group of people who 
wouldn't mind ignoring the privacy concerns involved.

>Rejecting any option because it is not 100% of what you want is a 
>usually a very poor strategy in any situation. Very rarely in life 
>can we have everything that we want. We have to compromise. Some 
>improvement, 50% of what we want is better than nothing. Any 
>improvement is better than no change.

IRV is not, in any way, an improvement - that is the point.