IRV wins big in SF & Vermont

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

First, about offering the IRVies a mitigation compromise, that's
been tried repeatedly, and the IRVies have shown that they're
determined to impose on the voting public all the faults, failures
& problems of unmitigated IRV. Every mitigation compromise proposal
was rejected by the IRVies.

But now all of us who consider IRV a mistake for SF should contact
the organizations & individuals who opposed IRV in SF, and give them
full information about IRV's problems (something we should have done
before the election). Maybe they can still stop IRV from being used.
Maybe they can block the purchase of IRV balloting equipment, or
achieve a repeal of the IRV initiative, or provide so much public
understanding of IRV's undesirability that the public will want the
initiative to be ignored.

But, also, in case IRV actually gets used, we should also ask those
SF IRV opponents to demand that IRV election balloting-sets be
publicly available, so that we can check for the various kinds of
undemocratic violations & failures that IRV is prone to. There are
so many ways for IRV to fail that it's sure to fail soon. How much
do you want to bet it will fail in some way in its 1st use?

Here are some things that I'd check for:

1. A result that, when published, would show some people reason to
   regret that they didn't bury their favorite by ranking a compromise
   over him.
2. A violation of Monotonicity or Participation
3. A result in which a voted CW, a BeatsAll candidate, loses--
   especially if s/he is also the voted favorite of the most people.
4. An extreme majority-rule violation
5. A violation of Consistency.
6. A violation of Heritage or Regularity

Let's tell the SF IRV opponents that we want to check for these
violations in each election, and ask them to demand public availability of 
the IRV election ballot-sets, perhaps on disk, so that we can
conduct that check on each IRV election.

We'd point out that even Plurality never violates Monotonicity,
Participation, Heritage, or Regularity, but IRV does. And maybe, to
groups interested in reform, we could also point out that
Approval violates none of those criteria, and also won't ever make
anyone regret that they didn't bury their favorite, or ever make
them feel a need to.

Mike Ossipoff


_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com