[EM] IRV and Brown vs. Smallwood

[Kathy Dopp]

> From: Markus Schulze <markus.schulze at alumni.tu-berlin.de>
> Subject: Re: [EM] IRV and Brown vs. Smallwood
>
> Tony Solgard was president of FairVote Minnesota
> when he wrote the quoted article in which he claims
> that Condorcet was unconstitutional in Minnesota.
>
> Also the report by the League of Women Voters of
> Minnesota refers to him as "Tony Solgard, President
> of Board of FairVote Minnesota".

Markus,

I decided to read the LWV, MN report and it is rife with mistatements
of fact and almost seems like it was written by Tony Solgard himself.
Apparently the LWV, MN did not try out any different examples
themselves that would have tested the false statements that were being
fed to them by Fair Vote, MN and so merely repeated the lies and
included the limited examples that backed up the lies about IRV/STV.

Sad that the LWV, MN did not think to try out diverse examples so that
they can see that in examples that correspond more closely to
real-life elections, that IRV/STV does *not* find majority winners or
solve the spoiler problem and causes a host of new problems.   Fair
Vote is truly one the most-skilled organizations at misleading the
public that exists today.

IRV/STV is essentially a sequence of plurality elections where ballots
are treated arbitrarily unequally where voters are involuntarily
excluded from participating in subsequent rounds even if they fully
fill out the ballot whenever the number of candidates exceeds the
number of ballot positions plus the number of positions to be filled.
The unequal treatment of ballots in IRV/STV causes non-monotonicity,
and a host of other undesirable, unfair outcomes.  And if all that is
not bad enough, IRV/STV eviscerates the public oversight and
transparency of elections due to its being not precinct-summable and
of exponential difficulty to hand count or to audit.

That anyone would suggest that anyone should use such an inane voting
method as IRV/STV is beyond my understanding - except if they are
trying to help voting machine vendors profit by selling an all-new
round of high-tech voting machines or if they are trying to implement
a voting method that makes it much more difficult to detect vote fraud
when it occurs.

Cheers,

Kathy