[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

fsimmons at pcc.edu wrote:
> About six years ago Toby Nixon asked the members of this EM list for a advice on what election method 
> to try propose in the Washington State Legislature. He finally settled on CSSD beatpath.   As near as I 
> know nothing came of it.   What would we propose if we had another opportunity like that?

Being who I am, I would either pick Ranked Pairs or CSSD (Beatpath, 
Schulze): the former if it's more important that it can be explained 
easily, the latter if precedence is more important.

> It seems to me that people have rejected IRV, Bucklin, and other methods based on ranked ballots 
> because they don’t want to rank the candidates.  Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) anticipated this 
> difficulty in 1884, and he suggested what we now call Asset Voting as a solution.
> Asset voting is the simplest solution to the spoiler problem.  Approval is the next simplest.  IMHO 
> anything much more complicated than Approval or Asset voting doesn’t stand a chance with the general 
> public here in America.   For this reason most IRV proposals have actually truncated IRV to rank only 
> three candidates.  This destroys IRV’s clone independence.

I'm not sure about this. If you look at history, ranked voting has been 
used many places in the US, and the voters didn't seem to complain about 
ranking -- the methods were usually repealed because the candidates or 
the political machines didn't like them.

For instance, as I've mentioned before, New York used STV for ten years. 
Cincinnati did, too, and I think they still use STV in Cambridge, MA. 
There was also the Minnesota use of Bucklin, which wasn't stopped 
because people didn't want to rank, but because the courts found it 
unconstitutional for some strange reason.

Most ranked methods also permit the voters to truncate. Even IRV does, 
though it then loses the "majority winner" feature. Thus, if the voters 
don't want to rank all the way down to the write-ins, they don't have 
to. They can even bullet vote if they so desire. If I'm to speculate, I 
think the reason for truncated IRV is so that already existing optical 
mark counters can handle the ranked ballots, to save on the infrastructure.