[EM] Approaches to achieving voting-system reform

Michael Ossipoff email9648742 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 29 17:39:06 PDT 2012


Pluralitly's requirement to 0-rate all of the candidates except one,
is undemocratic enough to maybe be the subject of a legal challenge, a
voting-rights court case calling for allowing voters to choose, for
themselves, whether to give each and any candidate 1 point or 0
points. Plurality is a 0-1 point system with a peculiar requirement to
0-rate all but one candidate.

There are a number of non-Republocrat parties using IRV. There would
probably not be any point in trying to convince them to change to a
better voting system. Politics is characterized by loyalty, and there
probably is strong loyalty toward the people who introduced IRV to
those parties and organizations.

But that's ok: If the voting public were competent enough to elect the
Greens with Plurality, then they wouldn't have any trouble at all
making good use of IRV. IRV would work just fine for voters who were
able to elect the Greens with Plurality.

Of course there are already some organizations using Approval, and a
few party organizations using Score.

I've already discussed a number of reasons why, due to strategy
problems, count-fraud vulnerability,and enactment difficulty, methods
such as Beatpath and VoteFair wouldn't be good proposals.

VoteFair, in particular, would be an especially poor choice, because
it can't even be counted in polynomial time. Didn't someone say that a
VoteFair count would be in the "NP hard" category?

Mike Ossipoff



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