[EM] "Implied ranked choice" method

[James Gilmour]

Rob Brown  > Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 9:50 PM
> One of the biggest problems with ranked choice voting 
> (whether it be tabulated 
> by a condorcet method or IRV or whatever) is that ballots can 
> be rather 
> complex and it would presumably be expensive to implement as 
> well as to > educate people on how to vote.

"PR is as easy as 1, 2, 3 ...".   Official education slogan when STV-PR was re-introduced in
Northern Ireland in 1973.  It says it all.  STV-PR has been implemented successfully with paper
ballots for many years.  Electronic voting machines were used successfully for STV-PR in the
Republic of Ireland in 2002 (only problem was the machines used had no paper audit).

> Another problem is > that voters would 
> need to be familiar with a larger selection of candidates 
> than they do today,

Yeah - democracy don't work too well if the voters are ignorant, but in a democracy that's the
voters' choice.
 
> since there would be less need to filter them out via primaries.

I'm not a fan of US-style primaries, but there would be no need to drop them for either
single-winner elections or multi-seat elections.  All parties will want some method of finding their
"best" candidate or candidates.

> Instead of the voters having to rank candidates, they just 
> vote like they do 
> today, for a single candidate.  But each candidate would 
> provide the list of  second choice candidates.

If you really believe in democracy as representation of the people I don't see how you can support
any form of so called "proxy voting" in which you hand over this critical decision of choosing YOUR
representative(s) to a candidate or a party.  The support for proxy voting on this list quite
literally amazes me.

James