possible misunderstanding

[Mike Ositoff]

A few days ago I said I'd advocated Sainte-Lague. The only reason
I used the past tense was because I'm not into PR these days, for
the reasons that I gave. It would be an improvement in the U.S., but
others are dealing with it well, and so it isn't an area where I
feel that help is needed. Additionally, whereas single-winner methods
_drastically_ differ in their merit, some "reforms" being no better
than Plurality, maybe even worse, there are no bad PR methods or
systems, since they all pretty much carry out the PR goal.

Also, as I was saying, when people are so suspicious of their
representation, they're doubly suspicious about a wholely new
concept of representation (new for them). They seem more likely
to want to bypass representation altogether, and so, as I said,
direct democracy seems more winnable.

For those reasons, I decided a few years ago that it would be
more productive for me to specialize in single-winner methods
when discussing electoral reform. But I'll soon be retiring from
that too, as I said I was before.

Single-winner methods have been greatly under-discussed. 

***

Another slight gaffe: When writing my recent letter here about
direct democracy, when I mentioned single-winnner methods for
multi-alternative initiatives, I named Approval first. Though
I preceded it by the words "at least", and said that EM's best
rank-methods would be preferable, maybe, when talking about
something as radical as the DD system I described, it doesn't
make sense to skimp on the voting system, and so, when talking
about a voting system for an ideal kind of democracy, I should
have just mentioned the more ideal voting systems, and only
suggested EM's best methods (that's how I refer to them, because
they're getting too numerous to list whenever mentioning them).

***

Mike Ossipoff