A few days ago I said I'd advocated Sainte-Lague. The only reason I used the past tense was because I'm not into PR these days, for the reasons that I gave. It would be an improvement in the U.S., but others are dealing with it well, and so it isn't an area where I feel that help is needed. Additionally, whereas single-winner methods _drastically_ differ in their merit, some "reforms" being no better than Plurality, maybe even worse, there are no bad PR methods or systems, since they all pretty much carry out the PR goal. Also, as I was saying, when people are so suspicious of their representation, they're doubly suspicious about a wholely new concept of representation (new for them). They seem more likely to want to bypass representation altogether, and so, as I said, direct democracy seems more winnable. For those reasons, I decided a few years ago that it would be more productive for me to specialize in single-winner methods when discussing electoral reform. But I'll soon be retiring from that too, as I said I was before. Single-winner methods have been greatly under-discussed. *** Another slight gaffe: When writing my recent letter here about direct democracy, when I mentioned single-winnner methods for multi-alternative initiatives, I named Approval first. Though I preceded it by the words "at least", and said that EM's best rank-methods would be preferable, maybe, when talking about something as radical as the DD system I described, it doesn't make sense to skimp on the voting system, and so, when talking about a voting system for an ideal kind of democracy, I should have just mentioned the more ideal voting systems, and only suggested EM's best methods (that's how I refer to them, because they're getting too numerous to list whenever mentioning them). *** Mike Ossipoff
