[EM] Better Choices for Democracy

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 06/19/2025 6:56 PM EDT Michael Garman via Election-Methods <election-methods at lists.electorama.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Rank the Vote came out of the gate with a tangible strategy and playbook for grassroots voter education, endorsement seeking, and fundraising.

Ya know, Trump came down the escalator a decade ago with a playbook and marketing strategy and has succeeded far more than they deserve, TO OUR DETRIMENT.

> You don’t have to like the organization or its cause, but you can’t deny that it has a plan in place and that it’s achieved results — winning dozens of campaigns and recruiting hundreds of thousands of supporters across the country. If the organization had popped up with a website, a few prominent backers, and little else, I’d have dismissed it as similarly misguided.

It's true.  Better Choices is still in the Ivory Tower and I am trying to influence changing that.  I dunno if Nic Tideman will listen to me or not.  There are several things they're doing wrong, regarding the IRV vs. Consensus choice and debate.  The first thing is that we must not surrender the term "Ranked-Choice Voting" to the IRV crowd.  Condorcet RCV (what they're calling "Consensus Voting") is RCV.  It is no less RCV than is Hare RCV.

> I think this group is pushing a neat idea.

The "neat idea" is foundational to democracy where votes are valued equally and where all contingencies resolved by the ranked ballot are considered by the method.

The "neat idea" is that: If more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected.  Now for anyone rejecting or diminishing that "neat idea", the first question to ask them is why *should* Candidate B be elected if more voters prefer Candidate A?  The excuses that come from FairVote about that are pathetic.  They *know* they can't really justify it, but because their method *needlessly* fails that basic value of democracy (majority rule, which is necessary to value our votes equally), they used to just ignore the issue, but failures keep just popping up.  So they make up a bogus and circular argument and try to pretend it's scholarly: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08430 .

That "neat idea" is less important to RankTheVote or FairVote advocates than just marketing their own half-baked solution and then *entrenching* it so that the "neat idea" (which is really just the equality of our vote) will never be considered because the half-baked idea is too entrenched in our politic to ever be changed.

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r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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