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[VoteFair]

On 2/8/2017 1:59 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> It seems simple enough to just do a New Zealand ballot:
> 1. Do you want to change the voting method? (yes/no)
> 2. If yes wins, what do you want to replace it with? (use either
> Plurality or Approval for the meta-election method here)

Nope.  In order to make the decision fair, the final vote needs to be 
yes/no.  That means the method needs to be picked first.

Yes, all of us here know that just about any method is better than 
single-mark ballots.

And yet, look at what Ontario (a province in Canada) did years ago. They 
formed a citizens committee and rigged it in favor of closed-list PR -- 
which still uses single-mark ballots! -- and then the yes/no vote among 
all voters yielded a no-change result.  Thank goodness!  Because 
closed-list PR is worse than what Canada already uses.

As I recall, one of the recent popular ideas in Canada was to use 3-seat 
STV.  That's not going to yield proportional results in Canada where 
there are 3 or 4 main parties.  In my opinion it takes about 5 seats 
before STV becomes proportional.

In other words there are so many choices and sub-choices that voting 
about voting is not going to yield a meaningful result.  Instead, as 
happened in Burlington VT, money will support whichever election method 
keeps control in the hands of people who can use money to undermine 
election results.

Richard Fobes


On 2/8/2017 1:59 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 02/08/2017 05:03 AM, VoteFair wrote:
>> On 2/7/2017 4:03 PM, Monkey Puzzle wrote:
>>> I've actually become more optimistic recently.  I think the
>>> opportunity for reform is actually brighter now than it would have
>>> been had Trump lost.
>> Just after the election I too was hopeful.
>>
>> However I have lost that optimism as a result of seeing that most voters
>> have become distracted by other, less-important, election issues, such
>> as voter suppression, "fake news," Russian hacking, gerrymandering,
>> electoral college votes, cabinet-member choices, etc.
>>
>> Compared to those issues, banning single-mark ballots would have far
>> more success.  Alas, we have not been able to get that concept across.
>>
>> I was also optimistic that Canada would follow through on the prime
>> minister's promise to abandon "first-past-the-post," but that has ended
>> with no reform because election-method reformers cannot agree on what to
>> replace FPTP with.
> It seems simple enough to just do a New Zealand ballot:
>
> 1. Do you want to change the voting method? (yes/no)
> 2. If yes wins, what do you want to replace it with? (use either
> Plurality or Approval for the meta-election method here)