[Election-Methods] "Town E-meetings" for encouraging group intelligence and working toward consensus

[Ralph Suter]

Terry,

Thanks for providing information about the British Columbia citizens 
assembly. I had forgotten about that. One minor clarification: the 
main purpose of the assembly, I believe, was to find better methods 
for apportioning representatives in the provincial legislature, not to 
find better single winner voting methods.

As for your concern about "circular firing squads" being organized by 
opponents of IRV, that is not at all what I was proposing. Rather, I 
(and Jan as well) was proposing ways to help people become better 
informed about IRV and alternatives to it. That would include helping 
people understand that plurality voting is the worst alternative of 
all and needs to be replaced as soon as possible with better voting 
methods. Furthermore, I specifically argued against an "anti-IRV" 
effort in favor of efforts simply to help people become better 
informed about alternative voting methods.

Jan and I and many other people are troubled not only with the 
weaknesses we believe IRV has but by the fact that FairVote, the 
leading pro-IRV organization, has for more than 10 years 
systematically failed to FAIRLY discuss concerns about IRV with people 
who don't think it is a good remedy, especially given the 
now-well-documented unreliability of voting systems throughout the 
U.S. -- a problem that Kathy Dopp and other voting administration 
activists are much better informed about than FairVote is. FairVote 
also has systematically failed to acknowledge that other methods may 
be superior to IRV for at least some purposes (e.g., in meetings of 
relatively small numbers of people where majority approval voting is 
not only far simpler and quicker than other methods but much better 
when the goal is to develop consensus agreement about important 
decisions). The truth is that if anyone has organized a firing squad 
against its opponents, it has been FairVote.

I speak as someone who attended the founding meeting in 1992 of the 
organization that has evolved into FairVote (originally Citizens for 
Proportional Representation, then Center for Voting and Democracy or 
CVD). I know FairVote's Executive Director, Rob Richie, and I'm 
familiar with many of the details of how the organization came to 
adopt IRV as its preferred single winner election method without 
permitting any public debate about it, even though a number of 
prominent experts on its own advisory committee (Steven Brams, Arend 
Lijphart, and others) have expressed strong preferences for other 
methods. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, the Election-Methods email list 
was started because Rob Richie and other CVD people thought debate 
about IRV was a waste of time and refused to allow it to be continued 
on an email list CVD had been sponsoring. (I'm not an original list 
subscriber, so others know more about that history than I do.)

As for your concern about shoring up the status quo in favor of 
plurality voting, that doesn't have to be the result of an effort to 
better inform people about alternative voting methods. One alternative 
to plurality, approval voting, would be so easy and nondisruptive to 
implement that we all ought to agree that it would be a good first 
step to improving on plurality. Other and better methods could be 
adopted later, after voting administration problems that now make IRV 
and other complex methods (including Condorcet and Range) so 
problematic are resolved.

-Ralph Suter


Terry Bouricius wrote:
> Ralph and all,
> 
> As you responded to Jan Koch's E-Meeting idea, I'd like to offer responses 
> to a couple of your ideas (a tangent of a tangent).
> 
> 1. The idea of a citizen jury is well worth pursuing. As many people on 
> this list are probably aware, there was actually a successful use of this 
> model in British Columbia dealing specifically with how best to change the 
> voting method there. This citizens assembly drawn by lot was created by 
> the Provincial government, and resulted in a provincial referendum. The 
> assembly's web site has lots of information...at 
> http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public
> 
> Ontario used the citizens jury model as well.
> 
> There was also an attempt to get a bill passed in California to use such a 
> citizens jury for examining voting methods in California.
> 
> 2. As to taking action in regards to Fort Collins...Fundamentally, I 
> believe election method reformers should NOT form circular firing 
> squads...That is, advocates of Approval or Range, etc. should NOT insert 
> themselves into places where a campaign for IRV is under way, just as 
> advocates of IRV or Condorcet should not go into a community where there 
> is a campaign for Approval. The more experiments with a variety of 
> alternative voting methods the better. By raising one-sided objections to 
> any particular reform proposal that is being seriously considered, the net 
> effect is most likely to be to shore up the status quo, rather than to 
> advance one's favored method. If election method experts put their united 
> effort into explaining why current plurality voting is bad, rather than 
> attacking other election reformers' efforts, we would all be better off. 
> That is not to say, of course, that we shouldn't continue this thoughtful 
> behind the scenes discussion about pros and cons of various methods.
> 
> Terry Bouricius