[EM] Janets questions

[JanetRAnderson]

Dear Creigs, Mike, Bart and David,
Thank you for such quick and mostly understandable responses.  Calling CVD
anti human rights, I still don't get!)

Right now I am wearing two relevant hats.  The Washington for CPR group is
focused on Washington State, not DC.  We are a relatively small group which
has an active petition to amend Seattle's City Charter which would cause a
vote on the question, should Seattle's local elections be conducted by a STV
method?  (This would apply to our Mayor, Prosecuting Attorney and 9 Council
members.)  We have 18,000 signatures and need approximately 28,000 valid
ones.  We are also lobbying the State Legislature to pass a bill which would
apportion our State's Electoral College Votes for President, in proportion
to the State's popular vote.  The third thing we are working on is an
alternative to our State's Primary election system which will have to be
changed next year as a result of a recent US Supreme Court decision.  That
action will force our legislature to more seriously examine our election
system than they have for many years.  For that reason, we feel they will be
a bit more receptive to education about alternative voting methods.  At the
moment, our position has been to eliminate the primary election completely
(having parties do their own nominations by party rules) and conduct the
general election using IRV, hoping it would be a first step towards multi
member legislative districts using STV.

The second hat I wear is Chair of the Washington LWV Election Methods study
which has served as the basis for two meetings of all the State's local
leagues this fall..  If you don't like what California is doing, you
probably won't like what we did either!  The study can be found at
www.lwvwa.org/election.  We were faced with the need  to provide enough
information to serve as a basis of two or three hours of discussion by
people who for the most part are even less math inclined than I am!   We did
not include Condorcet in fear of losing our audience on details.  Since most
 of our elections, either for single offices or members of a representative
body, are held in single member districts, it was a huge hurdle to help them
consider that the two kinds of offices could be elected in different ways.
As it is, about half the members who attended the first round of meetings
admitted they had not read the material or that their eyes glazed over
before they got to the end!

I accept Kenneth Arrow's (and your?) theorem that there is no perfect
election method.  I am not content to wait another 200 years for someone to
successfully counter that idea.  As you will see in the Introduction to our
study,  representation in our state is so badly out of kilter, even baby
steps in the right direction will be an improvement.

I am a pragmatist and this is what we are faced with on the national LWV
level:
Most Americans are very provincial, they know the American Way is the best
way!  It is an enormous challenge to get them to consider alternative
election methods.  We have a tiny opportunity to get the attention of League
members using the written word (which can not be too long or they won't read
it) and one to two hours of group discussion time before making some kind of
decision.  Since each State has it's own set of election laws and there are
great differences between them, I think the best we can hope for at the
national level (and perhaps state level) is to support a change in election
laws which will allow more flexibility and experimentation.

I think of CVD as a clearinghouse of information for the relatively
independent worker bees in various states.  I think of them as pragmatists
rather than researchers.  As for software, what is Cambridge, Mass. now
using for their elections?

I have not yet had time to visit the web sites you referred me to, but I
will.  I hope you now have a clearer idea of what a LWV "study" can and
cannot do.  I think there is a need for the work you do in the ivory tower
as well as what we do.  I'm not sure how long I will remain on this list,
but do keep my address and let me know of any break throughs or consensus
you might achieve.

Thanks again.
Janet