[EM] Populism and Voting Theory

[Brian Olson]

On Oct 17, 2008, at 9:44 AM, Raph Frank wrote:

> Anyway, you would rank PR-STV behind single winner election methods?

As a priority of things to do? Yeah kinda. It's substantially a  
separate issue. There will be single winner elections (mayor,  
governor, president, other one-off seats), and there will be multi- 
member bodies and some of those should be converted to a PR system,  
and for the time being getting better single winner elections could  
apply to all those districted elections. So I think getting ranking/ 
ratings ballots on single winner votes is the single biggest change we  
could make to the electoral system.

But hey, follow your passion. There are plenty of good things to do  
and we should do them all and I think we're most effective when we're  
working on what we personally care most about and in coalition with  
the right allies even if they're focusing on different aspects of the  
movement.

> CPO-STV (or maybe Schulze-STV) are obvious improvements, but with big
> costs in complexity.  I do think that vote management is a weakness of
> PR-STV (I wonder if Schulze STV would stop parties bothering to try).
> Also, the district sizes need to be reasonable (say 5+).  In Ireland,
> there are 3.86 seats per constituency on average, which I think is to
> low.

Oops, I may have written imprecisely. I meant "PR-STV" to mean the  
general philosophy of having Proportional Representation governing  
bodies, likely elected by a variation on STV.

> Also, if you could make one change, would you implement IRNR or
> redistricting reform?  Unfortunately, with extreme gerrymandering, I
> think most methods would still elect a member of one of the two
> parties.

I'm still going for changing single-winner election methods as the  
biggest change, and likely biggest bang-per-buck we can get out of  
changes to work on.

Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/