April 02, 2003
Vote Reform Status
So I had some email activity about vote reform today. Evidently there were two efforts to pass IRV in Oregon recently, one statewide through an initiative process, and another in Eugene for city council.The initiative process bogged down for unclear reasons. I wrote some leaders at the Center For Voting And Democracy and they said that after some bad experiences they think that lobbying is a much more constructive approach than the initiative process. That aligns with a gut impression I had. I also found information on Vancouver WA's recent success in passing their IRV measure - while it merely allowed IRV as an option, didn't require anything, and didn't cost any funds, it still only passed 52-48. There's just a lot of lazy distrust out there.
The rest of the clues so far are coming from details emerging on the Eugene effort. I was forwarded part of OR's constitution that specifically details majority voting but also allows preference voting given the passage of laws allowing them. That's how I read it anyway - it's not against the constitution, but would require further law. Complicating this is the murmuring that the Secretary Of State plays a hand in this in terms of deciding whether or not to allow different voting methods. I don't know what that's all about yet.
Finally, there's been some chatter about superior voting methods. Right now I'm leaning towards Approval. I think Condorcet is better, but Approval is simpler, easier to explain, easier to implement. I'm getting feedback from others about how Approval is harder to sell than IRV. Here's a quote from a member of CVD:
It has one major flaw that comes up in the real world of elections: your second choice candidate can defeat your first choice candidate if you decide to approve of both of them. The end result is a whole lot of bullet voting and voter perceptions of something fishy going on. Politcally, it can be hard to defend it when something who could have more than 50% in our current plurality system, but lose under approval voting.Good points. I personally believe they fall apart given that I believe a consensus candidate should beat out a 51% candidate, but that's a philosophical issue that people don't usually even think about.
More as it happens...