Thanks for the history, Rob. This explains something I could never figure out. Sometime after I exchanged emails with Steve Eppley on the Alliance for Democracy (AfD) list in 1996 -- it may have been 1997 -- I emailed Rob Richie and Steven Hill of CVD urging them to allow the single winner voting method issue to be debated at an upcoming CVD national meeting. To my dismay, neither Richie nor Hill even bothered to reply to my request. It appears that their views had been hardened in favor of Instant Runoff Voting long before that and they didn't regard the subject as worth debating.
It was from Eppley's posts on the AfD list that I first learned of the importance of single winner election reform. For a short time, Richie and another CVD leader (Ed Still, I think) engaged in a debate on that list with Eppley. I thought Eppley's arguments were far more persuasive than the CVD people but they quickly tired of the debate and dropped out. It also became clear to me that the main reasons CVD has gone with IRV is that they think it is most politically feasible and achievable. It's interesting that at the time Eppley didn't say anything about approval voting as an alternative. Apparently it was only later that he decided that approval would be a good to advocate as a "pretty good" method that was better than IRV and would be a good intermediate reform. By the way, the ER (elections-reform) list still exists. Anyone can still subscribe without approval and post, though there have been no posts since November of last year and only 3 posts in all of 2004 and only 9 in all of 2003. The list was basically taken over by two obsessive posters who I'm sure you are familiar with, Donald Davison and the anonymous Demorep, who now does his obsessive posting of articles and reports with angry comments about gerrymandering (or at least some of it) on the Yahoo democracy list (groups.yahoo.com/group/democracy). If you want to read the ER list messages, just go to the list page and sign up. You must register your email with Topica if you haven't already in order to read the messages, but list memberships don't need to be approved. According to the list page, there are still 120 members, though I suspect many of the addresses are turned off because of bounces. And Steve Eppley is still listed as list owner. The list page is at: http://lists.topica.com/lists/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ (The reason for the odd url is that this is one of the lists that was ported from IGC after that ISP went out of the mailing list business and turned all its lists over to Topica.) -Ralph In a message dated 9/3/05 4:30 PM EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: << ER continued on for a number of years, moving from the IGC website to Topica (a Yahoo Groups-like offering), ending CVD's official involvement with the list. If I recall correctly, Steve Eppley volunteered became the new list owner at that time, but that's only a very foggy recollection. I think the ER list was discontinued (and unfortunately, the official archive nuked) when Topica went under/was acquired, somewhere around the 2001/2002 timeframe. >> ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
