[EM] Better Choices for Democracy

[Michael Garman]

If you don’t like the strategy, come up with a better one. Fight fire with
fire, not with emails to a list read by the ivory tower set.

On Sat, Jun 21, 2025 at 12:29 PM robert bristow-johnson via
Election-Methods <election-methods at lists.electorama.com> wrote:

>
>
> > 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.
>
> --
>
> r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
> .
> .
> .
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> info
>
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