User talk:RRichie/Archive 1

Archive 1

Welcome!

Hello, RRichie, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! MilesAgain (talk) 05:37, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 14:39, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Your vote at Abd's RfA

Hello there, I have stricken through part of your contribution here because it related to off-wiki activity. There is really no way that any user's posts in another forum entirely can have any bearing on their work here. (There is in any case the difficulty in authenticating that the posts do in fact come from the same editor.) If you have objections to Abd's adminship, I'm sure you can find examples of on-wiki behaviour to support these.

I have left your oppose vote intact, it is still counting against him. You do not have to give your reasons for an oppose, although reasons backed up with diffs from Wikipedia always strengthen a case. Kim Dent-Brown ^(Talk) 18:06, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Good to know. I'm certainly glad Abd's been rejected for any special administrative powers at Wikipedia. Even his latest post in the last day in IRV discussion about FairVote's alleged motivations are simply wrong... RRichie (talk) 19:52, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

You mean about why FairVote chose to call it IRV? What was the true reason? Ron Duvall (talk) 20:06, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

No, Ron, I meant his whole thing that we only support IRV because we see it as a road to STV rather than good in itself for single-winner elections. IRV is a name that makes sense to people. RRichie (talk) 22:43, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Richie, it might affect your satisfaction if you notice that the controlling reason was my lack of sufficient edit history, something easily remediable within a few months if I actually wanted to be an administrator, which I don't. And everything I've done, including reams of stuff you considered totally outrageous, was out on the table. User:Yellowbeard, by canvassing you, Tom, and Terrill, revealed his association with you, not that it was not already clear, but it was only clear to someone with detailed knowledge.

I have no idea who yellowbeard is. But it did seem like a quite a few of the opposing votes on you don't like what you say/do and how you say it as well, Abd.

Now it's plain to see, if it ever matters, and the net affect on my RfA was zero. But suit yourself, if you want to be happy, who am I to rain on your parade? I'll tell you this, though: I'm totally pleased by that RfA, it was much better than I anticipated. Some voters seemed to assume that I'd been active since 2005. Instead, I only started serious editing and learning Wikipedia policy at the end of September, 2007, or less than five months ago. It would have been completely astonishing if I'd been accepted. But I was nominated, I think, because the nominator wanted me to see something, and the community as well. Seems to have worked. Have a nice day.--Abd (talk) 21:27, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

He probably would have been a good admin too, although my only concern is that his attention would have been drawn away from Wikipedia:Delegable proxy, which I need his help on. You probably were unaware that an admin's extra capabilities are basically maintenance-related; they are limited to implementing the community's consensus and are pretty much supposed to back off of any issues that they themselves are involved with and get another admin to intervene if needed.

About this other stuff, though - can't we all just get along? I mean, we are all intelligent people and should be able to work together to come up with an unbiased, balanced, informative, well-sourced article. I don't believe that it's necessary to tear down IRV to promote approval voting, or DP, or any of these other systems - in fact, I think it could be harmful. But I don't think we should dismiss alternative systems either and act like IRV is the only game in town. I am fond of comparing it to World War II. The US and USSR did not get along and basically didn't trust each other. But, we joined forces to fight a common enemy. Then, after the war was over, we went back to being at each other's throats. And in the end, the better system won. Well, why not join forces against single-member district plurality, since that is what we all agree is a bad system? Just like the US fought Germany from the west and the USSR fought Germany from the east, you can attack plurality on one front and we'll attack it on another. And once we've vanquished plurality, we can duke it out amongst ourselves for which non-plurality system will prevail. You may well change your mind about IRV if, after more implementations, its results disappoint you. The same thing may happen with our DP project. I'm open-minded as to what is the best system, and I say give them all a try. One thing's for sure - we've been trying single-district plurality long enough.

I realize that Abd's posts take a lot of time to read, but he has a lot of insights and can actually help you make the article better. Every organization and project needs a (for lack of a better phrase) devil's advocate, someone who is willing to point out the weaknesses. Fortunately, DP has attracted many of them, and it is greatly helping our project. Just remember, the key with Wikipedia is to stay focused on citable facts, because that is where you will find your common ground. Original research - i.e., interpretations, analyses, etc. originated by Wikipedians, rather than coming from what we deem to be reliable sources - has no place here, and must be removed, even if it is correct. Repeated attempts to add such material, or remove relevant cited facts, in the absence of consensus to do so on the talk page, are potentially blockable offenses. If it appears that including a lot of certain kinds of material is making the article unbalanced toward one point of view or another, some of that content can be split off into a separate article and summarized in the main article. So, on those bases, everyone can make progress toward a mutually acceptable article. Ron Duvall (talk) 22:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Rob, I understand that Ron is a very experienced Wikipedian, using a new account for personal reasons. It shows. He's right about the process. --Abd (talk) 22:47, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Abd, we didn't pick fights with range voting and approval voting advocates! And Ron, we're fine with other people doing their thing.Our focus for single-winner reform is IRV, and we're quite content to focus on it. But it's a pain when people like Abd spend much of their activist time attacking us personally and IRV in general. As for Abd's posts here, sometimes he is fine for sure, but I think he's just wrong on other things -- the classic one being his refusal to accept that Robert's Rules really is crystal clear that they think IRV should be used for vote-by-mail elections where you aren't going to do repeated balloting. He also can be prone to leap to conclusions (feeling FairVote must hae written the IRV article on Wikipedia, say, which isn't true). But indeed it can all be a bit tiresome. RRichie (talk) 22:43, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

RONR doesn't say that IRV in particular is the best system for vote-by-mail elections, just that "In an international or national society where the election is conducted by mail ballot, a plurality is sometimes allowed to elect officers, with a view to avoiding the delay and extra expense that would result from additional balloting under these conditions. A better method in such cases is for the bylaws to prescribe some form of preferential voting." (p. 392). Preferential could mean Bordin, Bucklin, Condorcet, Contingent, Coombs, you name it.

I can see how you might get tired of it if you have a lot of other stuff you'd rather be attending to, I just happen to love editing Wikipedia as a hobby so I could this all day if time allowed. In reference to the range voting stuff, from what I saw, Clay went around spamming every IRV listserv and responding in every public forum that IRV proposals were being made a couple years back, and FairVote was mainly responding to those attacks. On wiki, I can see there have been five or six archives of talk pages about IRV and some bad blood. But as more or less of an outsider, it's easy for me to just take the view of, let's forget that past stuff and move on toward making this a good article.

You can focus on IRV, that's your prerogative of course; I think we do all agree that STV is a pretty good system. I think in the end, the main thing we need to do is get rid of the presidential system and switch to a parliamentary system which could be elected by STV, and/or perhaps even use delegable proxy. IRV is always going to have some issues, which can be fixed by going to STV. But if it's a single-winner election, how can you really use STV? The presidential system itself is inherently problematic no matter how it's elected; most countries that have tried it experienced constitutional breakdowns, and even here, we see a lot of abuses, such as the President (a public employee) claiming the right to speak with energy industry leaders in a non-transparent way, as part of efforts for formulation of energy policy. In a parliamentary system, Congress would have more power to rein in presidential abuses. Just something to think about. Ron Duvall (talk) 01:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'm a fan of STV for multi-winner offices and a fan of IRV for single-winner offices. We have lots of single-winner elections here and I suspect will for a long time...... On Robert's Rules, they proceed to define IRV as the one example they give of IRV, and that helps explain why so many private associations use IRV. .... As to Clay, he's still very active in his anti-IRV spamming. But yes, would be nice to move on. With Poundstone giving range such a good plug, maybe they can try to do something positive .... I just don't expect it, particularly with some of the emails I just received from Warren Smith today. Anyway, onward we go.RRichie (talk) 04:41, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Use of interspersal response on Wikipedia.

Rob, using interspersal to respond, chopping up an original edit, is disapproved, such as you did at [1]. If you need to respond piecemeal, quote the original. You can see an example in my RfA, on the Talk page, where I respond to your striken comments from the project page. I copied your striken comments and responded to them one phrase at a time, italicising them to clearly distinguish them from my responses. I know you might trust me about as far as you could throw me, so ask another user you trust if you think I'm just trying to make trouble for you. I'm not. Not here, anyway. --Abd (talk) 21:18, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Got it. And of course I know you want to make trouble for other reformers with whom you disagree. RRichie (talk) 22:45, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

You know what you think you know, but you don't know what I want.--Abd (talk) 00:25, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

WARNING: Do not edit war.

Rob, you are a clear Conflict of Interest editor, as the Executive Director of FairVote. You've been informed of guidelines for COI editors many times, but in recent edits to Instant-runoff voting, the article about the current major goal of FairVote, you have violated WP:COI many times, and today it became extreme. According to WP:COI, you should refrain from making any edits to an involved article that you could reasonably expect to be controversial, and reverting the edits of another editor, in the presence of dispute, is prima facie evidence of controversy. If you do not desist, I can fairly confidently predict that you will be blocked again. (For admins reading this, Richie was blocked by User:Tariqabjotu as an IP editor on 3 October 2007. I had personally confirmed the IP from external evidence, though that was not relevant to the block. Richie acknowledged having been that IP editor in discussion at [2], his diff is at [3].)

For reference, the following edits today were improper for a COI editor. Some of them contain some legitimate contributions mixed with removal of sourced content. I have not included edits I consider purely helpful.[4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] --Abd (talk) 22:25, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

To avoid crossing the 3RR line, even though it might be, as before, justified, I reverted your last edit, and then reverted myself. I'm asking you to revert my self-reversion, restoring the language which was an accurate summarization, without any POV insertion at all, and then we can continue to work on the article cooperatively. Please take this seriously. It is already possible that, if this comes to the attention of an administrator without my action, you could be blocked, and the project would lose your special expertise and important point of view. --Abd (talk) 22:01, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Abd, I should note that you have done quite a lot to the instant runoff voting article that otherwise is quite a stable one, with lots of people seeing it. Your interpretation of Robert's Rules and IRV is quite disputable ,but you want to put just your way of seeing it in the introduction of the article.

Note that my many edits today were in response to your massive insertion into the article of content from an article that had been ended by administrators. This also was controversial and others didn't agree with your decision. But you made the default having it in the article. You want the default to be your interpretation of Robert's Rules.

We all know that you are as much of an opponent of IRV as I am an advocate -- and that you are a very strong advocate of other systems like Bucklin that you create opportunities to put into the IRV article. I think I've been acting responsibly here and hope we can come to an understanding of how to move forward.

RRichie (talk) 02:57, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Richie, you are missing the point, and if you continue it, you could be blocked. Take a look at this edit on User talk:Tbouricius; I had nothing to do with it, as far as I know. (The timing could mean that it had something to do with my RfA, i.e., Bouricius came to the attention of the editor because of comments or fuss in my RfA.) I will answer the points you raise, but it's really moot.

Your view of what has happened is seriously distorted. Lots of people have looked at the RRONR question, and the only users who have stuck with your position and that of the other FairVote editors, I'll name them, have been you and the other FairVote editors. The FairVote editors are yourself, Terrill Bouricius, and then, more peripherally, Tom Ruen. Plus the sock puppets of User:Nrcprm2026. You are definitely COI, Mr. Bouricius has generally been considered so (not just by me!), and Tom Ruen has been careful not to even get close to edit warring; if we were to go to ArbComm, I don't know how they would decide about Ruen; but with his behavior, he'd probably be okay. You would not, and Bouricius could easily be in trouble as well.

What about me? Am I COI? You previously wrote, as an IP editor, as a reason for reverting an edit, that the editor was a critic, and you gave no other reason. That was blatant violation of the prohibition against article ownership. Critics are not COI because they are critics. If they make their living as critics, yes. If they are formally affiliated with a critical organization, probably. But just that they have a POV, even a strong POV, doesn't create COI. And I am *not* as much of a critic of IRV as you are an advocate, that's preposterous. What I am is actually an advocate of consensus based on neutral examination of facts and arguments, completely and thoroughly, and I have appeared to be your opponent because spin is generally an attempt to sidestep that process, to deceive, even when done in the service of some supposedly higher goal.

I put Bucklin into the article when it is, at least arguably, relevant. For example, RRONR recommends preferential voting, and notes that there are many other forms besides the STV method. What, a reader might think, is an example of the other forms. Tell me, Rob, what is the most notable other form? Hint: it was called "preferential voting" when it was in use, and that's what it was called in Brown v. Smallwood. You see this as promotion precisely because you are a promoter, so you see other election methods as rivals. This thinking is part of why the COI policy exists and why it does not make a good intentions exception. You are not allowed to edit the article unless you have a reasonable expectation that the edit will not be controversial. And when you get into edit warring with me, reverting back and forth, you have demolished any ability for me or others to assume that you simply did not realize that it would be controversial.

I do everything I'm doing with the understanding that ArbComm may look at it some day. They are not like the rest of Wikipedia: they use deliberative process. They still make mistakes, to be sure, but they are far more careful. It is conceivable that ArbComm would decide that I've been too attached to this article, and that I should likewise be under an editing restriction. But I'm not concerned by that. I do not own this article, I just happening to be standing, at the moment, for NPOV here, for balance, and because that means that criticism and facts that can carry some negative implications from the point of view of your agenda should be in the article, you easily see me as being just like yourself: promoting my POV. But I'm not. I have my POV, and I use it, but not as you do. I'm not interested in convincing people through casual impressions, through spin. I'm interested in the article being clear and complete, and if being clear and balanced means too much text here, guidelines suggest, not removing material, but splitting it out.

You have a mistaken impression about how the controversy material came to be in the article. You should read the AfD, i.e., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Instant-runoff voting controversies (2nd nomination). To me, the consensus was not clear, but what I was arguing for, and also everyone who had actually edited the article before (except for those who had previously voted for delete, including Yellowbeard) was Keep. I.e., keep the controversies article separate, and I did my best to keep it that way. When the tide turned from Keep to Merge and Redirect, I explained the trouble and problems that this was likely to cause. The closing administrator is not bound by the votes, but the closing admin decided to go with the ending trend: Merge and Redirect it was. (It's not "admins." AfDs are closed by a single administrator, who comes along first to do it once the period has expired.) And he wrote as an edit summary for his blanking and Redirect, "others can merge." Great. But, Rob, the decision was to merge. And that article was stable, there was no edit warring going on, and it was slowly being improved. There was, essentially, no reason to strip out large swaths of it, it was all entitled to a presumption of being reasonable content. In fact, of course, lots of it needed to be changed. But those parts aren't what you started to edit war over. You removed sourced content, you changed arguments to make them more in accord with the way you'd like the matter to be seen, and I still have only partly undone what you did.

The content was not "my" content. I was a major editor, to be sure, but I did not contribute the bulk of it. I was not willing to, on my own, remove large amounts of content that I considered correct, or fixable to be correct, and verifiable, even if not yet sourced. But I certainly have not attempted to reinsert such material taken out by others.

The Robert's Rules question was irrelevant. That did not come from the controversies article. On Robert's Rules, what you have been doing is inserting your interpretation, an interpretation you have promoted for years (quite possibly believing it, by the way). That interpretation even found its way into the Vermont IRV legislation, but if you read that preamble, the findings, there is a very strange contradiction in it. They emphasize the fundamental importance of making decisions by majority rule. This is certainly a Robert's Rules concern. They mention preferential voting from Robert's Rules. And then what they actually propose and implement is plurality, i.e., election by other than a majority of ballots cast. It is the same bait and switch that took place in San Francisco. "The winner will still be required to obtain a majority of votes." Right. Then, if so, why did the Proposition remove the majority requirement from the election code? If it was still required, why not leave it in? You really ought to read Brown v. Smallwood with new eyes. I think it was a bad decision, but they also quote other decisions, and one thing they quote is that it is not the marks on the ballot that count, but the "men" who made the marks. "Majority" means a majority of voters not of ballot marks. (Then then, immediately contradicted what they had quoted and became concerned about the fact that there were more marks than voters.) Preferential voting, and, indeed, Approval Voting, end up attempting to find a majority through alternative votes, the only difference between Approval and STV is that with Approval the alternative votes are simultaneously considered, but in the end, only one of them actually counts. You have misstated this so many times that you may have become incapable of understanding it.

Rob, you think of this as personal, me against you. It is not. I'm a rising tide, and unless you recognize it, you'll end up isolated on your little sand bar. You've built a dike of arguments, carefully constructed, but the holes are starting to leak. Don't fight the ocean of truth, you will lose. You have one good path here: cooperate toward making the article such that proponents and opponents will agree, this is true and this is accurate and this is complete within Wikipedia policies. Bouricius and I have often been able to find that, and the creation of the controversies article was by editorial consensus. Unfortunately, not enough editors worked to make that article clean and complete. Editors tended to write sections without sourcing. One of the things I did with the AfD looming was add sources for Pro arguments. Nobody had bothered. This really hurt the survival of that article. I didn't take those Pro arguments out because that's not what I do, unless I believe it can't be verified (which in this case would mean that we could not show that the arguments were actually being notably made). And nobody, certainly not you, helped to fix that article.

So we were faced with a community decision -- not my decision, not really the administrator's decisin -- to Merge. We could fix that, and I invited it, suggesting that we cooperate in one of two ways:

(1) Go to Deletion Review. We could argue that the editing should take place there, not here, and I think, by now, we could show that the material is not mostly going to disappear, as many voting in the AfD seemed to think. (Being unfamiliar with the public debate, they assumed that what was being written was mere personal opinion of Wikipedia editors. While there was probably some material there like that, that is not what was in that article, for the most part. It was simply unsourced reporting of the arguments being notably made.

(2) Edit the material here and then simply take it back to that article. We don't have to go to Deletion Review, which could be quirky. If someone doesn't like it, they could either oppose this through ordinary editorial means (revert the removal, for example, and blank and redirect the page we would have unblanked), or they could file another AfD and perhaps this time Ruen wouldn't muddy the waters with his faint objection to removing content and is loud complaints about what a mess the article was. (He was the third largest contributor, after myself and Bouricius, together they contributed more than I did.)

Nobody said, "Let's do that." Not yet, anyway. Rob, you think of this as a war. Others have suggested, including a former supporter of yours, that you stop thinking of it that way. It's up to you.

By the way, in looking at the old material where you acknowledged being the IP editor who had been blocked, I saw where I mentioned lying, and you denied that you had lied. I was referring to your comment to me in your mail of 25 September 2007, in which you wrote "Note that we've had a pretty light role in wikipedia -- nothing like the promo piece you have on range voting." How did I know that you were the IP editor? Style, knowledge of the subject, and POV helped, but it became very clear when I looked at the IP your mail had come from. Consistently and steadily reverting edits, as an IP editor, that showed criticism of IRV, was not a "light role," it was a heavy one, and you were, in it, cooperating with sock puppets of a known IRV activist. I do not know if you had anything to do with efforts to get me blocked, that may have been Salsman acting on his own, and it was stupidly done, it basically got you and Bouricius (and him) blocked. Over time, the article had steadily become a promo piece for IRV, because ordinary editors didn't have the patience to deal with steady promotional pressure. Yes, the Range article was *terrible*. But I didn't write that article; when you wrote about the "promo piece you have," you were thinking of factional affiliation, as if, because I recognize that Range Voting is simply an incorporation of the only meaningful measure of election quality into an election method, simple and natural, you think I'm going to promote it just like you have: think up a bunch of simple arguments that people will swallow, never mind whether they are true or not, deceptive or not. That is not me, period, and if you were paying attention, you'd have noticed it. --Abd (talk) 04:38, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Abd. I'm not "warring" with other alternative voting systems. I don't like sectarian attacks. Range voting folks have been extremely zealous in tracking and attacking instant runoff voting, as you know -- trying to block legislative and ballot measure successes, etc. This is not something I would ever do. Our website has very limited critiques of other systems because that's just not what I think reformers should do. In response to some criticism for not answering charges against IRV and explaining why we haven't embraced range voting and approval voting, I suppose we will need to do more. But I wish we didn't.

But your allies see it differently. When I testified to the Colorado voting systems task force last year, I focused advocating and explaining instant runoff voting and proportional voting, with only a slight reference to other systems the task force was considering. When Warren Smith testified, he spent most of his time attacking IRV. That's his decision, but it's a good demonstration of who sees this as "war." (Of course in this case, as in most other cases, I at least had the satisfaction of the task force deciding to recommend instant runoff voting for pilots, leading to the CO legislature passing a law carrying out that recommendation.

It's also clear that you want to oppose IRV. As you said on the range voting listserv on September 12, 2007, you indeed want to "intentionally irritate me" because you think it brings benefits. You go onto to say to Warren Smith: "Richie has considered you the bad guy. Part of the strategy of being a pair in the rump is that he may come to realize that you are the soul of openness, that you are not out to get him. Compared to Clay and me, and I *more* out to get him than Clay." Great....guess part of you must enjoy this exchange as you're "getting me" -- and having me spend time in long wikipedia exchanges.

We know you dislike IRV as much as I like it -- and youthink I'm some kind of lying devil or something even though I see it that we just disagree in our honest interpretation of the same facts. But note: I'm not on the approval voting and range voting pages at Wikipedia, much as I suspect they have a lot of disputable elements. -- and I doubt other IRV advocates are, although I could be wrong. I'm just trying to keep you from controlling this article to the extent you'd like to. And for me, I strongly disagree with your interpretation of RONR and I don't think it's all true to say your controversial interpretation of it and decision to place it in the introduction to the article is a "community decision."

It is completely true that I had a light role with the IRV article at Wikipedia, much as you want to call it lying. I had not the slightest hand in the page's creation and years of existence -- I don't have the slightest clue who did. At a certain point I noticed opponents were trying to put information into the article that I believed was questionable. And so yes, I started making some edits in response to that.

Anyway, moving forward, I think the article ideally would get to a point of being relatively "set" and then new information added as it is appropriate. That seems like a good goal and hope we can move toward that, with other Wikipedia folks ideally involved.

RRichie (talk) 12:57, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

We should keep our eyes on the ball, and the rules of the field. You are a COI editor. I'm an editor with a POV. You are not permitted to edit the article in a controversial way. You can make helpful edits, but reverting another editor is almost always not helpful in this sense, almost always it would be "controversial," practically by definition. Making repeated edits, insisting upon your language (or any particular language) is worse. If you accept this, and will follow this, we can proceed to cooperate. Otherwise it will continue to be a problem and I might as well do something about it sooner than later.

If I push some POV, that will show in the edits and upon review. Even as a COI editor, you have access to the WP:DR dispute resolution process. Right now, I would not advise it. If you, at this moment, took a problem to WP:AN/I, very good chance you'd be blocked, there are admins who would look dimly at your behavior. I know you think you are right. That won't help. But with time, this will dissipate. The community frowns on punishing people for past sins, it tends to be concerned about immediate behavior. But if behavior is repeated, then the community may look back and see that it was not new, and may respond more strictly.

As to the community opinion, it is difficult to obtain community opinion or consensus on Wikipedia, particularly with problems that can be a bit abstruse. MilesAgain filed two RfCs when he was active, and they turned up a little review from other editors. Who backed what I'd been saying. So, for the time being, that's the closest thing we have to community opinion. As far as regular editors paying attention to the article, there is mostly myself and you and Terrill and sometimes Tom Ruen and occasionally Joyce (User:Ask10questions) from North Carolina. She is a friend, but I have *never* asked her to weigh in on a topic. I've assumed that if we can agree on something, it is, relatively, NPOV. And if not, I'm going to insist on what can be verified; typically, I've looked at the claims about IRV that were in the article and found that many of them fell apart if examined closely, and the Robert's Rules of Order claim (you remember, it originally stated "Robert's Rules of Order recommends IRV....") was one of them. Another was the claim that IRV finds majority winners. (I think it has sometimes been stated as "guarantees majority winners.") Both of these claims continue to be repeated by FairVote.

Used to be that I'd say that I'd vote for IRV if it were on the ballot. I've changed that position, as I learned more. I'd vote against it. That's absolutely definite if the alternative were top-two runoff, which I've concluded, with all its faults, is better than IRV, as shown by election results. If it were plurality, the choice would be harder, but what ultimately cinched it for me was the cost, the investment required, the counting complexity, and bad experience with IRV could make other reforms more difficult. Reports from Cary, NC, it was a serious problem. SF has had serious problems. Again, you could get nearly all the benefits without that cost with any of several simpler reforms. Starting with the simplest of all, Approval. Just Count All the Votes. Simple Range methods (just a couple of ratings, like the -/0/+ used for some MSNBC polls that, to me, seemed extraordinarily informative). Or Bucklin, which preserves strict Majority Criterion adherence and the only problem I've seen you assert for it -- and, yes, FairVote has largely controlled all access to info about Bucklin, providing what is pretty obviously a distorted analysis of it that is repeated as authority in many places -- is LNH criterion violation. LNH is a voting system criterion that, in my opinion, interferes with a basic function of democracy: the finding of compromise. If I'm negotiating with my neighbor, and I want A and he wants B, if I let on that I might accept B, I "harm" my first choice. Bucklin, of course, only brings in additional preferences if there is no majority in the first round. The claim you have promulgated is that Bucklin was stopped because people weren't adding additional preferences, perhaps only 11% did so in some elections, I think you say. But that is totally enough to fix the spoiler effect! What I'd personally prefer, with *any* election method, is a majority requirement, and if we really want to avoid runoffs, we'd use Asset Voting, which simply allows the candidates receiving votes to distribute them, so *no* votes are wasted. Asset Voting was proposed in the 1880s by Lewis Carroll, whose brilliance I've been coming to appreciate recently. Warren Smith reinvented it in 2000. Most people, thinking about it, project onto ot current conditions that would not necessarily be sustained. With Asset, you could, for the first time, vote *totally* sincerely. You don't have to worry about "electability." Asset doesn't attack political parties, but it could make them almost irrelevant. In any case, a kind of asset could be tacked onto Bucklin with a majority requirement. So if there is no majority found, at the end of the descent through the ranks, the candidates receiving votes negotiate a result. And if they refuse to do so, well, the voters would know who was responsible for the impasse. I presume there would be a deadline, when there would be a new election held if no result were found. And good chance most of those candidates would lose votes in the rematch. --Abd (talk) 21:02, 26 May 2008 (UTC)