[EM] a comment

[David L Wetzell]

Sure, I agree with NGOs/third-parties or intra-party elections as the
natural places to experiment.

Thanks for the history lesson.

It seems that the prejudice of some in state supreme courts has contributed
greatly to stunting the development of democracy by experiment.

I think if we focus on experimental nature of democracy and use analytics
more defensively, like in showing why some "bad" rules are easy to show as
steps backwards(or sideways), then we'll help reignite Hope.
dlw

dlw


On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>wrote:

> At 12:20 PM 4/20/2013, David L Wetzell wrote:
>
>> If you're going to pit two election rules against each other by using
>> them both and then have voters decide between the cases when they differ
>> then you're going to have sample selection problems.
>>
>
> The "comment" seemed to assume public elections. Voting systems can be
> tried in NGOs, and that's where the future lies, my opinion. It's very
> unlikely that we will see major voting reforms take place in governmental
> election systems without them having seen usage in NGOs.
>
> Having said that, history isn't necessarily friendly to my idea.
>
> Bucklin voting was all the rage in the period 1910-1920 and a little
> later. Yet I never heard of it being used outside of public elections.
>
> It worked in public elections, no pathologies were asserted at the time
> other than that it allowed a runner-up in the first preference votes to win
> the election. That was considered horrifying to the Minnesota Supreme
> Court, which, effectively, interpreted the state constitution as
> *demanding* plurality. Very strange.... (FairVote later argued differently,
> but I'm quite sure they would have disallowed IRV just the same.)
>
> The only problem was that in nonpartisan elections -- party primaries,
> much later -- it frequently failed to find a majority at all. That wasn't
> Bucklin's fault; IRV would have failed even more. The real fix to that
> problem would have been a runoff, and what was *actually done* was to dump
> Bucklin and to use top-two, vote-for-one in the primary, with a runoff when
> no majority was found. If they had simply used a hybrid system, say a
> Bucklin primary, with a runoff when needed, history might be different.
>
> But Bucklin had been sold the same as IRV more recently: find a majority
> without expensive runoffs....
>
>
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