[EM] Declaration of Election-Method Experts and Enthusiasts

[Richard Fobes]

Here is what I've just written for the new section titled "Multiple 
rounds of voting":

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In highly competitive elections, multiple rounds of voting are needed to 
eliminate the weakest candidates so that attention can be focused on 
electing one of the most popular candidates.  Our supported election 
methods work as described for two rounds of voting if the first round of 
voting elects a single winner from each political party, and the second 
round chooses from among those winners.

However, different counting methods are needed if the same voters vote 
in both rounds. There are election methods that handle such cases, and 
they use the better ballots we support. However, we have not yet 
analyzed this category of counting methods sufficiently to express 
support for any specific methods.

We do strongly agree that single-mark ballots must not be used in any 
round of voting. More specifically, just as the candidate with the most 
first-choice votes is not necessarily the most popular, and the 
candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is not necessarily the 
least popular, the candidate with the second-most first-choice votes is 
not necessarily second-most popular, and the candidate with the 
second-fewest votes is not necessarily the second-least popular.

Also we agree that "open primary" elections are not fair. In this 
approach, the candidates who are identified as "most popular", 
regardless of political-party affiliation, progress to the next round. 
This approach fails to consider that the majority of voters who support 
the most-popular candidate are likely to be the same majority of voters 
who support the second-most popular candidate -- unless the counting 
method specifically compensates for this redundant influence. The 
remaining voters, who may almost be a majority, can end up with only 
getting to choose between the two candidates who are preferred by the 
majority. Expressed another way, the words "most popular" are ambiguous 
in the context of choosing which candidates deserve to progress to 
another round of voting.

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I'm sure I'm missing some important additional considerations, but they 
aren't coming to me at the moment, so I'll tap into your brains to help 
refine this section.

Of course we aren't offering a fair way to handle French presidential 
(?) first-round elections (in terms of which two candidates should move 
on to the final runoff election), but we have nothing specific we would 
agree on, right?

Richard Fobes