At 10:17 PM 1/18/2009, Terry Bouricius wrote:
Markus,
The source you cite is a Minnesota League of Women Voters report that
refers to an article with legal analysis in the Minnesota Bar
Association's journal, dealing with the Minnesota statutes and Minnesota
constitution.
"Municipal Voting System Reform: Overcoming the Legal Obstacles." Bench
and Bar of Minnesota. Vol. 59, No. 9, October 2002
FairVote is not responsible for reports by the League of Women Voters or
lawyers writing scholarly articles.
Perhaps that's technically true. However, that article has been cited
many times by FairVote, and one of the coauthors was with FairVote:
"TONY ANDERSON SOLGARD is chair of the board of FairVote Minnesota, a
nonpartisan, nonprofit organization educating the public about voting
systems and their effect on the quality of democracy."
The interpretation of Brown v. Smallwood, many times argued by
FairVote, including as an intervenor in the present case, has been
one which would indeed render any Condorcet method unconstitutional
in Minnesota. Not anywhere else, because the Brown decision was
idiosyncratic and the arguments in it not accepted elsewhere.
However, the Later-No-Harm argument isn't what the Brown court
actually decided upon, and they repetitively expressed
dissatisfaction with any kind of alternative vote, where a candidate
preferred by one voter faces many other candidates preferred by
another voter. In this argument, that the other candidates are
presented together or one at a time doesn't seem to be relevant.
As you know, it's a bizarre decision, because on the one hand, they
quoted with obvious approval that what mattered was the number of
voters supporting a candidate, not the number of marks on the ballot,
but then they complained about the marks on the ballot, with Bucklin,
exceeding the number of voters. On an IRV ballot, generally, the
number of marks on the ballot exceeds the number of voters!
In the end, with Bucklin, the winner is the candidate who was found
to have been voted for by the most voters. How the method gets there
is something else. IRV sequentially assigns votes, Bucklin considers
them in ranks and ultimately all of them at the same time if a
majority hasn't been found before that, a Condorcet method considers
them all simultaneously as well (though you can think of it as a
series of round-robin elections). The problem with IRV is that some
votes are counted and some are not. I agree that there is a problem
with this, but disagree that it makes IRV unconstitutional.
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