[EM] whipping-boy Borda

[James Green-Armytage]

Dear election methods fans,

	My school, which is a pretty bizarre place, uses a pretty bizarre voting
method for student government: Borda!
	Christ, I wondered, how the hell did they end up using Borda?
	What's even weirder is that they use Borda for multi-seat elections. Have
you ever heard of that anywhere else?
	Anyway, I suppose that I might as well go ahead and make the case for
them to switch to STV for multi-seat and Condorcet (probably just minimax
/ sequential dropping is fine) for single seat.
	So I am inviting you all to send me some of the most convincing and pithy
arguments against the Borda count. Obviously it is a clunky system that is
not as elegant as STV or Condorcet, but what are it's overall worst
effects? 
	Of course, I know it's nowhere near being a proportional system, so it's
amazingly arbitrary that they use it for multi-seat elections. Identity
politics are super big here, so I assume that minority representation will
be the most convincing argument I can make.
	Also, for single winner purposes, it's unfair to give people less voting
power in deciding between the frontrunners if they vote for a long shot
candidate first (a problem that IRV and Condorcet avoid).
	But anyway, I'm hoping that there is some more dirt I can dig up about
Borda. So if anyone wants to spend some time beating the dead horse that
is Borda, I will appreciate the input.

yours,
James Green-Armytage


P.S.	As far as the STV multi-seat elections go, I am not exactly sure
which version of STV to suggest. It is a question of either suggesting the
random version (that puts me on shaky ground for obvious reasons, but it's
by far the easiest to count), or suggesting the fractional transfer
version, in which case they will have a choice of trying to do it by hand,
or just downloading the free software from ERS. Anyway, I guess I'll just
ask them what they prefer, but if anyone has an opinion, let me know. I
doubt that much more than 400 or 500 people vote in any given election, so
it's all pretty small potatoes stuff. Sometimes there are more seats than
candidates! But I guess it would have educational value to switch to a
better method, if the people in student government aren't too blockheaded
to change.