[EM] remember Toby Nixon?

[fsimmons at pcc.edu]

----- Original Message -----
From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm 
Date: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 11:31 pm
Subject: Re: [EM] remember Toby Nixon?
To: fsimmons at pcc.edu
Cc: election-methods at lists.electorama.com

> 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 ranking -- the methods were usually repealed because the 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.

It's true that historically and even recently ranked systems have been adopted here and elsewhere.  But 
these successes are infinitesimal in comparison to the failed initiatives.

Why have the initiatives failed?  Overwhelmingly because the voters have rejected the idea of ballots that 
require ranking of candidates.  

I first saw this pattern ten years ago when FairVote Oregon was working on an IRV ititiative here in 
Oregon. And it has been the constant theme in failed initiatives ever since then.  Lewis Carroll was right!