For the benefit of those who don't understand why FairVote promotes IRV
(instant-runoff voting) in opposition to many forum participants here,
I'm posting this extract from an excellent, well-written, long message
by Abd.
On 3/13/2013 11:46 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
...
Example from the United States: There was a conference in the early
1990s to discuss and support proportional representation. A small group
of people then formed the Center for Proportional Representation, and
leaders appeared. Eventually this because the Center for Voting and
Democracy. Early on, this thinking developed among the activists involved:
1. The best method for proportinal representation is Single Transferable
Vote. (it isn't but that's what they believed, these were not voting
systems experts, but political activists.)
2. STV requires a complex voting system. Read, expensive to canvass,
difficult to audit, etc.
3. The single-winner version of STV could substitute, it was thought,
for the fairly common runoff voting, which requires, sometimes, a second
ballot, which is expensive.
4. They invented the name Instant Runoff Voting, then, for single-winner
STV, and represented it as equivalent to Runoff Voting. (It isn't, and
studies have clearly shown this, but, again, they are coming up with an
*action plan*, something they think they can sell.)
5. And so the primary activity of CVD became promoting instant runoff
voting.
Early on, voting systems experts tapped them on the shoulder and pointed
out that, while multiwinner STV is a decent voting system, the
single-winner form wasn't, it suffered from some serious problems. They
rejected these experts as impractical dreamers. Only their plan, they
believed, had any chance of success. And, of course, they, and their
Executive Director, became heavily committed to a whole series of
deceptive arguments.
Because many people saw the defects in existing systems, they did
succeed in getting IRV implemented in a few places. And then those
places started to discover the problems with IRV, and quite a few have
rescinded the implementations, and it's possible the backlash has made
it unlikely for voting system reform to succeed in those places for many
years. The experts whom they rejected have started to independently
organize, and to present evidence at hearings and in campaigns, it's
getting more difficult for FairVote, as they ended up calling
themselves, to win implementations.
I'll add that in Canada the FairVote group directly advocates STV and
European-based PR methods, not the stepping-stone IRV path.
(BTW, please don't confuse the similarly named FairVote and VoteFair names.)
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