[EM] question re EM list history

[RLSuter at aol.com]

Thanks for the history, Rob. This explains something I could never
figure out. Sometime after I exchanged emails with Steve Eppley
on the Alliance for Democracy (AfD) list in 1996 -- it may have been
1997 -- I emailed Rob Richie and Steven Hill of CVD urging them
to allow the single winner voting method issue to be debated at an
upcoming CVD national meeting. To my dismay, neither Richie
nor Hill even bothered to reply to my request. It appears that
their views had been hardened in favor of Instant Runoff Voting
long before that and they didn't regard the subject as worth
debating.

It was from Eppley's posts on the AfD list that I first learned of
the importance of single winner election reform. For a short time,
Richie and another CVD leader (Ed Still, I think) engaged in a
debate on that list with Eppley. I thought Eppley's arguments were
far more persuasive than the CVD people but they quickly tired
of the debate and dropped out. It also became clear to me that
the main reasons CVD has gone with IRV is that they think it
is most politically feasible and achievable. It's interesting that at
the time Eppley didn't say anything about approval voting as an
alternative. Apparently it was only later that he decided that
approval would be a good to advocate as a "pretty good" method
that was better than IRV and would be a good intermediate
reform.

By the way, the ER (elections-reform) list still exists. Anyone
can still subscribe without approval and post, though there
have been no posts since November of last year and only
3 posts in all of 2004 and only 9 in all of 2003. The list was
basically taken over by two obsessive posters who I'm sure
you are familiar with, Donald Davison and the anonymous
Demorep, who now does his obsessive posting of articles
and reports with angry comments about gerrymandering
(or at least some of it) on the Yahoo democracy list
(groups.yahoo.com/group/democracy).

If you want to read the ER list messages, just go to the list
page and sign up. You must register your email with Topica
if you haven't already in order to read the messages, but list
memberships don't need to be approved. According to the
list page, there are still 120 members, though I suspect many
of the addresses are turned off because of bounces. And
Steve Eppley is still listed as list owner. The list page is at:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/elections-reform@igc.topica.com/

(The reason for the odd url is that this is one of the lists that
was ported from IGC after that ISP went out of the mailing
list business and turned all its lists over to Topica.)

-Ralph


In a message dated 9/3/05 4:30 PM EDT, robla at robla.net wrote:

<< ER continued on for a number of years, moving from the IGC website to
 Topica (a Yahoo Groups-like offering), ending CVD's official involvement
 with the list.  If I recall correctly, Steve Eppley volunteered became
 the new list owner at that time, but that's only a very foggy
 recollection.  I think the ER list was discontinued (and unfortunately,
 the official archive nuked) when Topica went under/was acquired,
 somewhere around the 2001/2002 timeframe. >>