[EM] hello from DLW of "A New Kind of Party":long time electoral reform enthusiast/iconoclast-wannabe...

[Jameson Quinn]

Others have already responded to most of your points. I just wanted to say
one thing:

6b. I think that IRV3 can be improved upon by treating the up to three
> ranked choices as approval votes in a first round to limit the number of
> candidates to three then the rankings of the three can be sorted into 10
> categories and the number of votes in each category can be summarized at
> the precinct level.
>

I am not a big fan of IRV, though I find it better than plurality. Your
"improvement", however, would remove its primary selling points. There
would be incentives to truncate --- not use lower rankings --- and to bury
--- use the lower rankings to dishonestly promote easy-to-beat turkeys. I
suspect your proposed system would be opposed by many here as well as by
many inside FairVote --- two groups which don't agree on much.

In general, it is often tempting to "improve" a voting system with ad-hoc
extra steps. Doing so successfully isn't impossible, but it is not as easy
as it looks.


> 7. Moreover, I believe that the number of political issues, their
> complexity, matters of character bound the rationality of voters and make
> choices among candidates inherently fuzzy options.  So there's no cardinal
> or ordinal utility for any candidate out there and all effective rankings
> of candidates used to determine the Condorcet Candidate are ad hoc.


Yes, I believe that this is true. However, I don't think that you should
stop trying to do better just because you'll never attain perfection.


>  8. This is why I believe a lot of the debate over the best single seat
> election rule is unproductive.
>

Again, qualified agreement. I certainly think it's worthwhile to hash out
details here, among people with patience for that stuff. And I was the
instigator for the collective statement that Richard Fobes linked; so as
you can see, I think the best way to avoid wasting time on debate is not to
supress it (which doesn't work), but to keep it minimal and in its place.

We can agree to disagree, while agreeing that plurality is the main enemy.


> 9. What matters more is to get a better balance between the two basic
> types.
> 10.  Winner-doesn't-take-all elections are preferable for "more local"
> elections that o.w. tend to be chronically non-competitive.
>
> I think that's probably enough for now.
> I look forward to dialogues with y'all (I lived in TX from 3-9 then moved
> to MN, where my father became a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at
> the private liberal arts college where he met my mother, Bethel
> University.).
>
> dlw
>
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>
>
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