[EM] To Bill Lewis Clark re: stepping-stone

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Bill Lewis Clark said:

IRV is a winnable candidate for election reform, and like many winnable
candidates its supporters make some false promises.

I reply:

Yes, and you regularly vote for candidates whom you know to make false 
promises, don' t you. Does it ever strike you as odd that all the "winnable" 
candidates are most dishonest ones? Maybe they're the only winnable 
candidates because your tv tells you that they are, and you believe it. 
Maybe you're a tv-programmed sucker being led by a ring through your nose.

Bill continued:

I'd rather have some
form of Condorcet, Range Voting or Approval -- but they're not serious
contenders at the moment.

I reply:

Spoken like a true Democrat voter. If IRV is a better "contender", maybe 
that 's because CVD, for some reason, has detemined to promote an inadequate 
nonreform.

Bill continued:

Whenever I introduce people to alternative voting systems, I always make
sure to mention Condorcet -- but I usually point them to the Fairvote
website, because it seems to me that IRV advocates do a *MUCH* better job
of educating the public than Condorcet supporters do.

I reply:

That depends on how loosely you define "educate".  :-) If that's education, 
then the country would be better off without CVD's "education". How 
entertaining that you speak of education by people who won't take the 
trouble to educate themselves about what they're promoting.

Bill continued:

IMHO, Condorcet
supporters seem a lot more interested in attacking IRV, than they do
helping out with any serious election reform.

I reply:

Bill, not everyone agrees with you that IRV is a serious reform. Or a reform 
at all.

Bill continued:

That's a problem, but I think a far less serious one than the problem of
inertia.  You're leaving out a third camp -- which I think would be bigger
than the other two -- who will say "Now that we have a better
understanding of how different voting systems work, let's try to figure
out which one is best!"  That is, after all, how many people who had
previously supported IRV eventually became interested in Condorcet in the
first place.

I reply:

Is that what happened in Australia? And don't say that IRV hasn't committed 
its failures in Australia. It wouldn't show up in the data that are recorded 
and published.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Doing something right the first 
time is better than doing it wrong, and then hoping to fix it later.

Mike Ossipoff

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