Proponents of Instant-Runoff Voting in St. Paul, Minnesota, have decided not to submit signatures for their initiative this week. Therefore, the initiative asking voters if they wish to use Instant-Runoff Voting in city elections will not be before voters in this year’s municipal elections. Instead, the proponents will submit their signatures somewhat later this month, so that the initiative will be on the 2008 ballot. The proponents feel they need extra time for educating voters.
Very cool news. Hopefully by the time this rolls around, voters will be sufficiently educated that they’ll opt for Range Voting or at least Approval Voting instead of IRV.
http://rangevoting.org/CFERlet.html
Clay Shentrup
clay@electopia.org
415.240.1973
I would much prefer IRV to RV. It has many similarities to IRV which is a good thing. The only decent argument over IRV is technology which is not good enough for me.
The big negative for me is getting rid of 1 person 1 vote. If we have a range of 0 to 99, what is to stop two candidates from getting a 99, what about 3, or 4. With this system, unlike IRV, we would cease to have one person, one vote. Along the same lines the none of the above votes are disregarded. I personally believe this is one of the most important votes in any democracy and any system that attempts to erase this is not democratic. Unlike a 0, 2, or a 5 an X is disregarded and not included in the average. It is this reason that a quorum is required, but even so, the assumption of the NOTA or under vote is its not strategic but because of lack of information. In IRV, the voter controls the fate of a NOTA or the under vote, not some voting machine.
Clay:
Range voting and approval voting are both inferior to IRV, mostly due to use of voter strategy. Approval voting in particular simply reverts to first-past-the-post with strategic voters, and even if there is no strategy, it simply provides less information about voter preferences than IRV.
IRV also has an established successful track record. Range voting doesn’t.
See:
http://www.fairvote.org/blog/index.php/whyirv/