[EM] The Equal Vote Coalition and robla

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

The mailing list has been rather quiet of late, but I'm going to post two
messages.  First: a somewhat late announcement that may result in the
typical EM-style discussion.  I joined the board of the Equal Vote
Coalition in January 2025:
https://www.equal.vote/about

There's still some i-dotting and t-crossing to do as part of my involvement
(and so this could be short lived), but I'll describe below how I'm
thinking about it.  This first email is the email you should respond to if
you want to say how aghast y'all are that I'm completely sold out
(which...I'm not getting paid, so I'm selling out cheap, it seems).

On paper, the Equal Vote Coaltion is not rigidly a "cardinal-only"
organization.  They define "Ranked Robin" on their website
<https://www.equal.vote/ranked_robin>, which at one point was effectively a
hybrid of Copeland and Borda.  The branding is great, and reminiscent of
"Instant Round-Robin Voting" proposed by Jameson Quinn as early as November
2000 (and perhaps even earlier):
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com//2000-November/102819.html

Most folks with the organization feel that STAR voting is superior to
Condorcet methods.  Not me.  I feel like score/range voting requires too
much work from voters to figure out the best strategy (which, as near as I
can tell, is either vote the maximum score or the minimum; hence
transforming it into approval voting in practice).  STAR voting's
final pairwise comparison makes it acceptable in my eyes to put candidates
into more than two tiers, and I have a difficult time contriving realistic
scenarios where voters would be doing the wrong thing by voting sincerely.
I know many folks here disagree with that assessment, but...well ... reply
to me if you want to.  I'm happy to engage in the conversation again in
this thread.

I'm sending this email before the next email, because the next email is one
that I send with a very heavy heart.

Rob
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