[Election-Methods] Article about voting methods in Pasadena Weekly

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:08 AM 7/26/2007, Steve Eppley wrote:
>It proposes several better methods, including a
>simple but probably very effective patch for IRV: letting candidates
>withdraw after the votes are cast.

Nice. This could eliminate the center squeeze effect, making IRV much better.

Of course, this is kind of a variation on Asset Voting.

There are some technical problems, of course. To really make sense, 
the candidates would have to know the effect of withdrawal, they 
would have to know that they were going to be eliminated in the first 
round, or in some later critical round. Commonly, with IRV, the 
entire ballot isn't even counted.... why count a lot of moot votes, 
at public expense?

However, public ballot imaging, which I think is a fantastic idea, 
allowing the public to count the vote, would also allow candidates to 
determine the vote in intimate detail. As long as they have enough 
time before the truly official count takes place.

For a first reform, Count All the Votes (i.e, don't discard 
overvotes) makes a whole lot more sense, it's a no-brainer better 
than Plurality. People will argue about whether IRV or Approval are 
better, we know, but IRV has a lot of transitional cost, some 
possible harmful effects, such as Center Squeeze that your fix might 
also address in a way, and so it makes sense to me to go first for 
cheap and *arguably* as effective or more effective, and this not 
only does not prejudice further reform, I predict it will power it.

Once voters have the ability to vote for more than one, they will 
want the ability to indicate preference. And then we go toward Range 
or Ranked methods. The next Range method, Range 2 (CR-3) is quite 
interesting. And cheap, one more vote position only. Easy to count, 
easy to understand.