[EM] IRV vs Range on totalizing machines

[James Gilmour]

Warren Smith Sent: Friday, August 19, 2005 3:27 PM
> and the fact the New York city in 1937 was using STV voting - 
> they later abandoned it and switched back to plurality, a 
> fact that IRV advocates sometimes seem to conveniently ignore 
> and/or do not examine sufficiently).

It's not at all clear what WS sees in the NYC abandonment of STV-PR as relevant to the current debate about IRV and
other single-winner voting systems.  But from my reading of the history of STV-PR in the USA (by Douglas Amy and
others), it seems pretty clear that the campaign against STV was mostly big-money, party politics on the part of those
who had lost their (unfair) control when STV-PR was introduced.  In support of their anti-STV campaigns they didn't
hesitate to play the race card and promote a "reds under the beds" scare.  Maybe the lesson for today is that any voting
reform that might take power away from the big party machines and give it to the voters is likely to run into the same
opposition and have to face a campaign that will be every bit as dirty.
James Gilmour