[EM] Center for Election Science presentation at Indivisible SF

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

For those of you in the San Francisco area, a brief announcement.
Jeff Justice from the Center for Election Science is planning to speak
this coming Sunday (August 19) at our weekly meeting:
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/indivisible-sf-general-meeting-sunday-august-19-2018-tickets-48860582317>

It's going to be a 20 minute intro to election methods, followed by a
longer working group session where we plan to answer questions and
maybe have a mock election or two, and if things go really well, we'll
also start planning an activism session around this.

A lot of my messages to this list about California's top-two primary
system were inspired by conversations I've had with other folks at
Indivisible SF.  I've been talking about electoral reform for a long
time, and I've always thought that approval voting was *ok*, but until
recently, it hasn't been my favorite.  I've been impressed with how
much momentum that Center for Election Science has gotten around
Approval, and I'm willing to take Brams' and Fishburns' word for it
that Approval does a better job of picking the Condorcet winner than
IRV does.  After the primary election (where us Democrats were worried
about getting locked out in more races than we did) there was a sense
that "we dodged a bullet".  Moreover, we did get locked out of at
least one race (CA-08, where a Republican incumbent will face a
Republican challenger). As a result, there are many Democratic
activists here in California who aren't in love with our current
system.

Jeff is on the board for CES.  A couple of us at Indivisible SF had
the honor of meeting Jeff and Aaron Hamlin when Aaron was in San
Francisco.  I'm looking forward to seeing Jeff again on Sunday, and it
would be even better if we saw some of y'all at the meeting as well.

Rob