[EM] Rob Ritchie of CVD: the fiery divine reforming influencers of US political life

[Craig Carey]

At 31-03-2001 19:45 -0500 Saturday, Gregg Hill wrote:
 >In order that we get our terms standardized, consult the following webpage:
 >
 > http://www.idea.int/publications/ace/electoral_glossary.htm
 >
 >Gregg


This list is one of the least academic around. If any find that
I have written incautiously here then please elaborate on the
error and leave no mistake remaining. I see Mr Lanphier is letting
SPAM in. I am writing software to anonymise SPAM. I see that Mr
Bob Goodlatte of Virginia (congressman) is trying to get a bill
through to allow me to be fined US$10,000. A lot of SPAM does
leak out to other countries. I am in New Zealand and we almost do
not have SPAM.

I am unconvinced that Rob Ritchie is actually interested in IRV.

I wrote to his CVD agency recording my discovery that IRV fails
to constrain the power of enemies to the power they would have
if they used first past the preference papers and nothing came
back from the CVD.

There is an increasing mass of evidence that has gone far beyond
what would persuade a reasonable person that the CVD of Mr Rob
Ritchie has not got a functioning competent interest in the
Instant Runoff Vote (if we assume for a while that that is the
Alternative Vote" Method -- see this URL for a reference text of
nomenclature of names of common methods):


At 31-03-2001 19:45 -0500 Saturday, Gregg Hill wrote:
 >In order that we get our terms standardized, consult the following webpage:
 >
 > http://www.idea.int/publications/ace/electoral_glossary.htm
 >
 >Gregg


The CVD of Mr Ritchie does not communicate over IRV. It is a cow pen
and the members of the CVD do not have an interest in IRV. They must
be of very low intellect in the sphere of the mathematics of IRV since
they try to find out properties of IRV by studying the First Past the
Post method.

I could say this for the CVD in case they felt they wouldn't: if you
are a mayor and you wrongly lost, it might be because a good method is
similar but I (Rob Ritchie) very clearly and consciously decided to
allowed a relaxed rule for both 'limiting the power of enemies [i.e.
if they use extra preferences]' and 'prohibiting negative weights to
be applied to supporting votes'. A major factor is that such a relaxation
can allow a tilting of faces and a tilting of one or two intersecting
'win-lose boundary flat' will tend to reposition a third receding
boundary flat. There tend to always be a third face since to not have
one would mark the method as being sharply non-monotonic in that region.
When the 3rd face is shifted across the point corresponding to the
election results then the wrong winner won.

The point I want to make is that wrong winners will be elected all
over USA and Mr Rob Ritchie is strongly suspected to be the single only
architect of that. Currently the CVD plan is to pipe down and lose or
shred or whatever, the e-mail they get. The CVD is an evil agency and
who subscribed here has any data indicating in a fairly clear way that
the CVD is not at the beginning of a decline to greater deliberate
misleadingness in the presentation of what IRV is?. Let's have a vote
perhaps: when will the CVD produce a research paper that admits that
IRV is a definition of polytopes and, say, that it is not always
possible to alter {a:(A), b:(B), c:(C)} into {p1:(AB),p2:(BA), q1:(AC),
q2:(CA), r1:(BC),r2:(CB)} [where a+b+c=p1+p2+q1+q2+r1+r2], and have the
win lose statutes of {A,B,C} be held unchanged?. Also there is the
non-monotonicity problem.

The CVD does not promote IRV because it has divine itch. If there was
a trace of a intelligence that the word "divine" could connote, then
Rob Ritchie would not be promoting such an atrociously dumbly designed
method. Yet feeble-brained journalists will write about the CVD as if
it had a spiritual purpose it wanted good. As far as I know, Rob Ritchie
doesn't like all his e-mail. It is like a pea (or a mayor or eventually
a president or an MP) rolled down into a crevise in a soft chair and it
had to be squashed. I must be mindful of my readers: let the mayors be
squashed quietly. I am sure Mr Ritchie would not be insensitive to that.
The exquisite range of emotions make man a king of the universe: and
naturally some lives of god that are animals may have to be reduced in
numbers. Which is better at visualising triangles, I won't comment on.

I deleted out my text about bull rings and Senators.




At 02-04-2001 09:20 -0400 Monday, I Like Irving wrote:
 >
 >
 >  ----------- Forwarded Letter ------------
 >Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 17:20:24 -0500
 >From: Rob Richie <FairVote at compuserve.com>
 >Subject: CVD Member Flash! CSPAN Sunday / Fox & CNN Monday
 >To: Blind.Copy.Receiver at compuserve.com
 >
 >Greetings!
 >
 >Thank you for supporting the Center for Voting and
 >Democracy. It's been a productive, eventful start

The Centre of Voting and Democracy has achieved so much that
it could be reduced 100-fold with a single grain of borax,
were a speck of rain to fall.  Let's have the readers ask
themselves: would the CVD ever call an international
competition to investigate the mathematics of IRV. It is a
topic beyond the ability of the subscribers of this list, who
don't seem to be making the minutest bit of progress whilst
nevertheless writing a lot.


 >to 2001. Look for a full update in the next day or two
 >with news about new legislation on instant runoff voting
 >and proportional representation in more than a dozen
 >states, three federal bills on proportional representation,
 >new reports on our website, noteworthy upcoming events,
 >impressive new articles and more.
 >
 >For your more immediate attention, I wanted to let
 >you know that our president John Anderson will be

The big Senators look better if they have bigger extra-big
bull rings through their bright wet noses. The CVD could
offer degrees in attaching shiny bull rings to blinded or
stupid Congress-person's noses.

 >a guest on C-SPAN's Washington Journal program
 >Sunday morning, April 1st. The call-in program on third
 >party politics will air live from 8 am to 9 am EST,  then
 >be repeated from 11 am EST to noon -- and don't forget
 >that our clocks move forward an hour tonight!
 >
 >In addition, I will be featured in a Fox News story on
 >redistricting that will air on "Special Report with Brit
 >Hume" in the 6 pm EST hour on Monday, April 2. I also
 >will be featured in a CNN News story on the state of the
 >electoral reform debate in "Inside Politics" between 5 pm
 >and 6:30 pm on Monday. Two weeks ago, I appeared on
 >NBC Evening News to discuss electoral reform. We're
 >certainly gathering more attention these days, and our
 >thanks to you for making it possible!
 >
 >Best regards,
 >
 >Rob Richie
 >Executive Director, Center for Voting and Democracy
 >fairvote.org


Obviously it was not written for me, but fairvote.org is a
place to learn nothing true and everlastingly true.
I am very unaware that the CVD desires elections to be fair.
People need to be jungle cutters to get through the self
serving propaganda the CVD presumes interiorly regards as
being evidence of its own thinking. Worse, it aspires to
Leonine character and emanates self consciousness. That is
not a great contribution to mayors. The "1-2-3" campaign is
a campaign to promote ignorance. Anybody find out who it was
especially directed to?. It is actually able to be a complex
study: trying to infer an intelligent purpose from the details
of the rather mediocre and mislead dull comments that Rob
Ritchie and various other anonymous people, cast off out into
the winds of the IQ-frozen US public.


----

Mr Ossipoff might have been recently writing on a topic saying

    'adding a preceding preference for a complete loser will make
    a later candidate that would have won, turn into a loser'.

It was undescriptively named.

What Mike never says is just how extreme the alteration has to be
to get that problem out. Indeed it is about always Mike's aim to
never use a symbol or an algebraic polytope expression or anything
whatsoever that exact, including an exact method of reasoning
corresponding to:
   (a) actually writing good definitions that define something [what
   tends to happen is that the definitions are botched at multiple
   levels including incredibly at a superficial grammatical level];
   and
   (b) actually referring to them [when Mike botches a definition
   it never seems to block out the view of argument or indeed even
   have a perceptible effect on the course of the proof which tends
   to be sketched out, all of which makes it difficult to get
   agreement that the definitions are missing or badly drafted],
   and
   (c) actually using inference and logical reasoning. There are a
   lot of little tricks, the dumbest and most stupid of which is
   saying 'if the aim is to get a good method for voters then a good
   method will follow'. It is a bad technique, Mike, to keep writing:
   "I was wrong". What was the formulae for the P function that I
   wrote to you about. By not writing formulae, many pages of English
   can provide nothing whereas with formulae the matter can be stated.



Let's start up a new list. I could invite Mr Catchpole to administer
the day to day details (if any) [but he can barely write, which
certainly an unexpected development]. Mr Schulze has been practising
truncating comments.

I have a mailing list on STV:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/single-transferable-vote

and another on bits and snippets on IRV (a recent US movement):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/instant-runoff-vote

It is better that I run an IRV list than the CVD since it is fairly
obvious to me that I know more about IRV than all CVD's members do.
The CVD is not an agency that wants to know about IRV. So far we do
not seem to be getting all the evidence we'd hope for that it is also
not an agency that would ever want to mislead others into thinking
IRV was good. It is too dissimilar to the ideal method to be a good
method.

I will let Rob Richie reply. Let each reader imagine Gauss is a spirit
on their left and Euler is a spirit on their right. Ask the question:
why aim to construct laws that prevent use of better methods. How many
such methods are excluded?. Not even a dog wants its puppies to be
identical to itself, (and it is suspected immediately that genius was
not something that carefully thinking men of modern America would believe
is an aspect of the CVD's nature).