> Simply put, IRV creates a system in which the candidate who 
> receives the most votes may actually lose to a candidate who 
> receives fewer votes but is a popular "second choice".  

That may be true but why is that bad?  What happens now, in the scenario you
present, is that the person who is elected is someone the majority of the
voters feel is no better than the third best option. I think that is worse.

> PV effectively means that you vote for a political party not a 
> person.  As proposed in Minneapolis, it would also require 
> all or some of the city council to be elected at-large.  

There are many ways of doing PV only some of which involve voting for a
political party instead of people. My most recent experience is with Single
Transferable Voting that only involves voting for people.  There is a lot of
information on the web about it. It, as with most forms of PV, is a good way
to ensure some minority representation.

> 
> The system isn't broken.  The majority of city council 
> members are DFL because that is who the voters chose.  
>
>Jim Bernstein
>Fulton

The system isn't broken if you happen to be in the majority party and are
being represented well. What about the majority of the people who are not
represented well? With no minority representation due to the winner-take-all
system dissenting voices from the public are excluded from their government.
The current broken system is how you get a government that does not
represent the citizens well and is not representative of the population.
It's how you get governments controlled by a political machine instead of
the people being governed. Using a current event as an example, do you think
the Park Board is broken?  I do.

Darrell Gerber
Mpls

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