[EM] Re: the simplest election reform

[Dave Ketchum]

  I do not understand you:

First, you discard my words about primaries, as if they are not worth 
rating as good, bad, or indifferent.

THEN you say primaries are your one and only topic????

A point to remember is that primaries cannot be a top topic, more 
important than voting method:
      The major current method is Plurality, for which primaries perform 
an essential service.
      New methods get proposed, for which primaries have little, if any, 
positive value.  Discarding primaries, for having too little value to 
justify their large expense in time and money, could usefully be part of 
such a proposal.  Even here, it could be dangerous to specify discarding 
primaries as essential - better to call them an option that can be debated 
as such - rather than demanding that those who like primaries reject the 
method.

DWK

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 11:10:34 -0700 Araucaria Araucana wrote:

> On 15 Jun 2005 at 18:32 UTC-0700, Dave Ketchum wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:15:50 +0200 (CEST) Kevin Venzke wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Ted,
>>>--- Araucaria Araucana <araucaria.araucana at gmail.com> a écrit :
>>>
>>>
>>>>Approval voting is a reasonable first step.  But what do you do about
>>>>current top-two runoffs, or primaries in general?
>>>>
>>
>>You should be glad to be rid of top-two runoffs - too often, by locking
>>out the third candidate, they lock out the truly best liked candidate - 
>>think of voter desires as follows, but voting Plurality plus
>>top-two:
>>
> 
> You all are missing the point of my original question.
> 
> Abd advocates allowing overvotes to instantly enable approval voting.
> 
> But sneaking approval in this way doesn't solve the more general
> problem of eliminating the primary.  I *do* want to eliminate the
> primary, since it is merely an artifact of plurality/SVFPP.
> 
> So sure, I say go ahead and allow overvoting.  But don't lose sight of
> the end goal.

-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
                  If you want peace, work for justice.