[EM] Meta-criteria 5 of 9: Value: ease (cost)

[Jameson Quinn]

Ease, or cost, is the lowest possible aspiration for a voting system. With
all the benefits that democracy brings in utility, expressiveness, and
legitimacy, even the most expensive and byzantine voting system should be
considered cheap. Yet all other things being equal, a system which is
cheaper and easier to run is better. And this may be the lowest value, but
it is at least one that it's easy to get everyone to agree on. Partisans may
have their own self-interested definitions for utility, expressiveness, and
legitimacy; but nobody can argue with cost. This is why FairVote/CVD decided
to focus much of its reform efforts on replacing runoff elections: it could
use the easy argument of cost.

As FairVote correctly discerned, the most obvious cost difference is between
a one-round and a runoff system. Still, I'd personally argue that if more
important values are at play, it may well be worth leaving the door open to
runoffs.

That brings up a final aspect: implementability, the ease with which one can
convince real democratic bodies to use a given system. I haven't included
this as either a value or a heuristic, because it really just rests on the
values and/or heuristics of the decisionmakers. Still, for an activist
reformer, it's certainly a consideration. A good system should have a good
marketing pitch - a simple message which speaks to how it satisfies
underlying values.
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