[EM] article on preferential voting

[James Gilmour]

> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax> Sent: 30 December 2006 18:49
> At 01:05 PM 12/30/2006, James Gilmour wrote:
> > > Abd ul-Rahman Lomax> Sent: 30 December 2006 15:42
> > >
> > > Well, it is a bit irritating to me, and perhaps to some others,
that
> > > AV is used in the paper to refer to Alternative Vote; we routinely
> > > use it for Approval Voting.
> >
> >Maybe, but I suspect US readers will find that the acronym "AV" was
used
> >for "Alternative Vote" many decades before the term "Approval Voting"
> >was first coined by Robert J. Weber in 1976 (Wikipedia).
> 
> I did not claim that it was wrong, it was irritating. It's irritating.

Yes, but not half as irritating as it was, and is, for those of us
working with voting systems who had long used the acronym "AV" for
"Alternative Vote", to have a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies hijack the
acronym to mean something very different.

 
> STV, by the way, could be implemented in a radically different way, 
> where the transfer is under the control of the candidate receiving 
> the vote. 

Radical it may be, but I don't want anything under the control of the
candidate.  Elections are for electors, and so I want as much as
possible under the control of the voter.


> That would actually be a little closer to the implied 
> meaning of "single transferable vote." 

I think this is a most perverse interpretation of three simple words.
It is the elector's vote and in an elector-centred voting system (which
STV-PR is, or should be) each voter should decide how his or her vote
will be transferred.


> When I first heard the name, 
> that's what I thought it meant.

You must already have had a very candidate-centred view of voting
systems to have come to that conclusion.

James Gilmour