[EM] Fwd: Better election methods

[Joe Weinstein]

Dear fellow EM Approval Activists:

This is a posting I sent earlier today, in the wake of unhappy low-turnout 
Long Beach municipal primary elections, to our main local e-list of about 
250 civic reformers and environmental activists.

Joe Weinstein
Long Beach CA USA

----Original Message Follows----
From: "Joe Weinstein" <jweins123 at hotmail.com>
To: thisland at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Better election methods
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 18:22:06 -0700


I applaud Paul Racko ("Boycott...") raising the issue of getting a better 
election method here in Long Beach and elsewhere.  By ‘election method’ I 
mean the rules which govern how we voters can mark our ballots to register 
choices concerning candidates, and how the marked ballots yield winners.

Paul urges us to campaign for a method called IRV (‘Instant Runoff Voting’). 
  In my opinion this would be a mistake.  IRV is misguided and 
pseudo-reform.  In some respects IRV is even worse - and certainly more 
complicated than - the present Lone-Mark plurality method.

Contrary to a lot of the pro-IRV hoopla, IRV is NOT the only available 
alternative to the prevalent Lone-Mark Plurality method.  In fact, as an 
alternative, it is both over-complicated and under-performing.

To campaign nowadays for IRV is rather like, in late medieval days, 
campaigning for replacing tally marks by Roman numerals, while ignoring the 
availability of the Hindu-Arabic decimal system (and other place-value 
number systems).

There is a superior election method, which in fact operates as simply as our 
present method and a lot more simply than IRV.  It’s called Approval Voting 
(AV).  In Approval, just as now, the winner is the candidate with the most 
votes.  In Approval, for each office you simply vote as you do now: check 
off each candidate you support.  The only change is that Approval allows you 
unrestricted choice: you can support any number of the candidates:  the 
number of candidates you vote for is NOT restricted to be one or zero.

(Note on terminology:  I call our present method 'Lone-Mark':  you are 
allowed to make only one affirmative mark for an office, no matter how many 
of the candidates are quite good enough, as you see it.  Some people instead 
call this method 'Plurality'.  That term is misleading, because it simply 
means that our present method operates as you would expect ANY method to 
operate:  the guy with the most votes wins.)

IRV spinmasters make a big deal about their method allegedly eliminating the 
need for runoffs.  But Approval (and in fact other proposed would-be reform 
methods) likewise doesn’t need runoffs.   Actually, our present Lone-Mark 
Plurality method doesn't really require runoffs either: we could simply use 
one ‘primary’ round, and go with the candidate who gets most votes in just 
that round!

The main reason we do use runoffs at all is that they partly (but only 
partly) make up for the following big problem in our present method  (and a 
problem which in fact remains with IRV too!): namely, the method penalizes 
and eliminates a candidate who is the first choice of only a small minority, 
even though he may be most broadly acceptable (as a second choice).  To 
pretend to solve this problem, we hold runoffs.  Whoever wins a 2-candidate 
runoff - necessarily with at least half of the turnout - will (however 
illusively) claim to have broad 'majority' support.  We may expect to hear 
such claims here in June in Long Beach, even if once again we have 16% 
turnout.

Unlike both the prevalent Lone-Mark Plurality and IRV, Approval does not 
force you into an agonizing conflict between two goals: whether to give your 
best vote (your only Lone-Mark vote or else your top-choice IRV  vote) to 
your favorite, or to the lesser of two evils as an insurance against getting 
the worser of two evils.   With Approval, you can vote with equal strength 
for both sorts of candidates - or for others too - each for your good 
reasons.

All your votes are guaranteed to count and be recorded, and (unlike both now 
and in IRV)  there are no 'spoilers':  there is no way that (directly or 
indirectly) a vote for your favorite will help the ‘greater evil’ win, or 
that voting for a 'lesser evil' as insurance will reduce support to your 
true favorite, or that having several equal favorites will force you to 
choose arbitrarily among them: you can support them all without penalty.

Approval would thus enable voters to register all their true choices without 
fear of spoilage.  The result would both vitalize third parties and 
rejuvenate major parties.

Along with about 40 others, I participate in a world-wide e-list which 
specializes in discussing and evaluating election methods.  We each study or 
advocate our individual favorite more complex reform methods, but we largely 
agree on one thing:  Approval Voting is by far the most practical - simple 
and reliable - true reform method.

By the way, for multi-member offices (councils or legislatures), reformers 
have long advocated devices like proportional representation (p.r.).  The 
problem with old-style p.r. is that represented groups are artificially 
split into hostile camps, under control of political party bosses.  Recently 
members of our list developed a new method (which uses Approval Voting) for 
council elections with many advantages over old-style p.r.  This method 
gives precedence to candidates and issues which reflect concerns of voters 
rather than just party bosses and ideologies.

I refrain here, but I would be glad to go into broader or deeper discussions 
about the enormous variety of election methods proposed and in use, and 
their strong and weak points.

Joe Weinstein
Bixby Knolls, Long Beach CA USA





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