[EM] I could use some help with advocacy.

[VoteFair]

I looked at your proposed wording change and I like the fact that it's a 
simple way to improve IRV.  (Anything helps.)

As I understand it, there's a pairwise comparison between the two 
candidates who have the fewest transferred votes, and the loser in that 
pair is eliminated.

Perhaps you should give it a name.  Perhaps one that begins with the 
words "Ranked Choice ...".  But not Ranked Choice Including Pairwise 
Elimination, aka RCIPE, because that's already in use.

Such a name makes it clearer that there is more than one kind of "ranked 
choice voting."

IMO most Condorcet methods do not qualify as "ranked choice voting" 
because that term seems to imply that candidates are eliminated one at a 
time.

If the FairVote folks claim that the RCV name is for a specific 
vote-counting method, you can point out that their intended definition 
is "IRV + STV" which is not just one vote-counting method.

If you give the method a name, then I'd suggest that you add an article 
to Electowiki under that name.  That allows you to answer the question 
"where is it described?" with a link to an at-least-somewhat 
peer-reviewed "publication."

It's sad that the money behind the FairVote organization has enabled so 
many people to be brainwashed into believing that Condorcet methods 
cannot be trusted.  Yet at least we can try to offer better methods that 
eliminate candidates one at a time, and that can be manually counted for 
demonstration purposes.

Sigh, one baby step at a time ....

Richard


On 4/14/2021 12:52 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>
> Thank you Rob and Richard.
>
> I had a 10 minute interview with the Chair and Vice-Chair of the committee.  The legislature is extremely busy with covid issues and the hot issue for this committee right now is about pensions for state employees.  There are a couple of bills bringing RCV to state elections and those bills are on hold and not going anywhere at all, for the moment.
>
> But the voters of the City of Burlington *did* pass the Charter Change returning RCV to Burlington after 11 years and uncorrected.  Same old Hare RCV that FairVote sells everyone else.  Because it's a Charter Change (which is like amending the city's constitution), this requires legislative process and approval.  We had other charter changes (some involving restrictions on gun possession) that were passed by voters and never approved of by the state government, but most of the time the state government endorses charter changes that win in the city election.
>
> When this Charter Change becomes a bill and is introduced to the legislature, it will be directed to the Government Operations Committee.   That's when they will hear from me and that's when I could use some help in numbers.  I think you guys know what the issue is, FairVote has mostly succeeded at disingenuously conflating the ranked-ballot with the Hare method.  This is obvious when they ditched "IRV" after that label has lost cache and replaced it with the term "RCV" which sounds better and implies that **only** their method (Hare RCV) is the only way to deal with these ranked ballots.  Most people and most legislators bought into that conflation and do not understand that there are other ways of looking at the ranked ballots and implementing democracy.
>
> I am promised by the Chair and Vice-Chair that they will read my paper and that I will be invited to address the committee.  My hope is that I will be able to present a short PowerPoint (essentially the same as here https://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/burlington-ballot-item-forum-irv-discussion ) but I don't think that I will get that much time.
>
> As soon as I find out more about when this Charter Change comes up, I will contact y'all and we can discuss what we can do.  But feel free to contact me or even post here on the list what you might be thinking about this and how best to advocate.
>
> I wouldn't mind getting help from across the pond from folks like Juho or Markus or anyone else that might support reforming Hare STV.
>
> Thank you.
>
> -- robert