When someone posted about the use of Borda to choose & order party lists in PR, and someone else suggested a form of Approval, I assumed that we were talking about replacing one single-winner method with another, for choosing & ordering the PR lists. It didn't occur to me till later that the original subject line mentioned STV as the proposal to replace Borda. Of course STV is almost surely the best way, but the person who wrote the original posting already knows that. When I used to discusss PR, I always said that STV would be the ideal way to choose & order lists for party list PR. But if there were any question about the feasiblility of setting up rank-balloting, or explaining STV to the voters, then I also always said that the Finnish system is a simple but good system. I don't discuss PR nowadays, because I've already said everything I knew about it, and because many electoral reformers are dealing competently with it in the U.S., & because I consider all PR systems & methods to be good. And also because we have a long, conservative tradition in which big changes would be especially difficult to achieve, and our public are suspicious of representation, and suspicious of any proposals for fundamental change in representation. And because we don't have national initiatives, where voters enact national legislation, and so the only way initiatives could affect national government would be for states to use better single-winner methods to choose their Congressmembers. Single-winner reform seems like less to ask for here, since it's just a better way of doing the same thing, a better way of picking representatives in our single-member districts. But some of us, including me, believe that even modest single-winner reforms would open up the regrettable "two-party-system" duopoly, & result in more freedom of choice for voters, and a better selection of choices available. Mike Ossipoff
