jeff.oneill's blog

In this issue:

• Provincial and territorial elections yield distorted results
• Fair Vote Canada donates $10,000 to support charter challenge against current voting system
• Meetings with MPs
• Tom Kent, 1922 – 2011

Provincial and territorial elections yield distorted results

During the brief period from October 3 until October 11, provincial and territorial elections were held in Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, Manitoba, Yukon, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ontario. Saskatchewan held its provincial election on November 7. All these elections were held under the first-past-the-post system, and all yielded horribly distorted results, as usual.

Fair Vote Canada issued the following media releases:

See it online here.

In this issue:

• Voting Reform Supporters Cheer Successful St. Paul Rollout
• Champions of Democracy Give to the Max
• Democracy Reform Powerhouse Karla Ekdahl Earns AFP Award
• And Once More – Thanks to You!

Voting Reform Supporters Cheer Successful St. Paul Rollout

We at FairVote Minnesota have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving! The St. Paul debut of Ranked Choice Voting was a massive success, thanks to the comprehensive voter education campaign we led with Ramsey County, a well-designed ballot and the system’s inherent ease of use.

The results for the multi-winner voting system poll are in. Only 15 people voted, but the results are interesting nonetheless. The votes were counted using instant runoff voting, Condorcet, and the Borda count.

Instant Runoff Voting

Not surprisingly, Meek STV was the runaway winner, and WIGM STV was a solid second place. I do find it interesting that some people prefer WIGM STV to Meek STV. Meek is clearly better than WIGM in terms of the quality of the proportional representation, but apparently some people find the simplicity of WIGM more important.

Open list PR was in third although the one voter for closed list PR had Meek as the next choice.

Rob Richie of FairVote recently posted a nice summary of IRV elections that will take place on Tuesday:

• Portland, Maine -- Open seat race for mayor, 15 candidates
• San Francisco, CA -- Open seat race for mayor, along with city attorney and sheriff, all multi-candidate races
• St. Paul, MN -- city council races, some with more than 2 candidates
• Telluride, CO -- mayoral race with incumbent facing two members of city council
• Takoma Park, MD -- city council races, with 1 three-candidate race for open seat

I recently updated my ballots page with ballots from real, government elections. I'll try to get ballots from these elections as well and add them to the ballots page.

The results are in for the Poll for Favorite Single-Winner Voting System. Note that I deliberately used the word "Favorite" and not the word "Best". The results indicate merely the preferences of the voters (a small and biased sample) and should not be take too seriously. I find the results interesting because they provide clues as to what people who like one voting system think of other voting systems.

Regardless of which way you count the votes, Instant Runoff Voting is the winner. Results are shown below for (1) Instant Runoff Voting, (2) Condorcet Voting, (3) Approval Voting, (4) Borda Count, and (5) Coombs Method. I find these all to provide interesting information.