At 11:51 AM 3/14/2013, Ralph Suter wrote:
The historical perspective by Abd ul-Rahman
Lomax posted by Richard Fobes has a number of
inaccuracies. It is apparently a "top of the
head" summary based on memories of what others,
including myself, had written several years ago.
Yes. I just wrote it. I did not go back and review the e-mail from Mr. Suter.
The organization now named FairVote began with a
two-day organizing meeting (not a conference) of
about 75 people held in Cincinnati in the spring
of 1992. Its initial name was Citizens [not
Center] for Proportional Representation, with an
exclamation point intentionally included with
its acronym (CPR!). The name was changed a year
or so later to Center for Voting and Democracy
(CVD), then 10 or so years after that to FairVote.
I don't recall seeing that name before, but maybe
that's just my poor memory. It really doesn't
matter. The essence of what I wrote is being
confirmed, but Ralph provides some significant
new information. My point here, by the way, was
just to explore an example of how activists take
over, it's in the nature of activism, as others
were saying. It is, I believe, possible to avoid
this hazard *without* sacrificing the energy of
activists. But it takes a certain kind of initial
organization, I suspect. And, generally, nobody knows how to do that.
Virtually the entire focus of the 1992 meeting
was on advocacy of proportional representation.
Single winner voting was discussed very little.
Right. Single-winner elections guarantee, under
the *best* of conditions, that up to 50% of the
voters are not represented. It can easily be
worse than that! (In San Francisco, RCV (IRV)
candidates have won with less than 40% of the vote.)
I attended the meeting after having learned
about it from two articles about the need for PR
in the US and an announcement/open invitation
published in In These Times magazine. As I
recall, they were written or co-written by
Matthew Cossolotto, the meeting's leading organizer.
The decision to strongly promote Instant Runoff
Voting (a name that was chosen after a number of
other names were used or considered), was made
only several years after the organization was formed.
Yes. That history has been described elsewhere.
The main reasons for promoting IRV rather than
other single winner methods were initially political.
As I wrote.
The thinking was that it would be much easier to
sell, as a logical improvement to familiar,
widely-used runoff elections, than other methods.
And that logic was not widely debated and
questioned. The decision was made by a small group, as a *political strategy.*
And in any case, CVD's leaders regarded single
winner reforms as much less important than proportional representation.
Who were they? Further, there may be some set of
"leaders" who thought that, but activists tend to
become focused on specific goals, the near-term.
IRV was seen as a kind of "foot-in-the-door"
reform that could pave the way to much more significant PR reforms.
Yes. It even made a kind of sense, *if* one
assumes that that PR will use STV. The position
also missed something important, certainly in the
history of voting system reform. It missed that
the *target* had become the most widely-used
reformed voting method. Reading back over
political science documents in the early part of
the last century, runoff voting was considered a
very important reform. Yes, it has one major
problem, Center Squeeze, but IRV has the same problem.
I don't think there has ever been much serious
discussion among the organization's leaders
about the pros and cons of IRV and other single
winner methods, though I think it's unfair to
suggest, as Abd seems to, that they have been
intentionally deceptive in their arguments favoring IRV.
Well, what I've suggested is not being
"intentionally deceptive," but being "willfully
negligent." There are various common arguments
about IRV that are frequently advanced by
FairVote, and some of them are highly misleading,
and if Rob Richie, for one, doesn't know that,
he's turning away from clear evidence, and we
have seen that. He's an *activist*, and activists
argue to win, not to tell the plain truth. His
career depends on being perceived as successful,
and it would probably take sophistication that he
doesn't possess to see how to pursue the
*original goals* of his organization without
being deceptive at all. He only needs to be
deceptive, to suppress what "would only confuse
people," -- in other words, might risk a lowering
of support for what he believes is good for ...
the cause ... because he set a tactical goal that was poorly chosen.
In addition, a leading FairVote advocate of IRV
(though he first called it "majority
preferential voting") was John Anderson, the
1980 independent presidential candidate.
Anderson published a New York Times op-ed about
it in July 1992, shortly after the CPR!
or
