Another issue of Voting Matters has arrived. This issue has five articles:

• James Green-Armytage: Four Condorcet-Hare Hybrid Methods for Single-Winner Elections. This paper describes four voting procedures for electing a single candidate from ranked preferences of voters. The four procedures differ very slightly from one another, and all are notable for electing the Condorcet winner when there is one and for strongly limiting the opportunity to benefit from strategic voting.
  

OpaVote (formerly Opal) now has a mode called "Poll with Registration". With this mode, people can only vote once per email address so it is a useful way to conduct polls where people are limited in their ability to "stuff the ballot box".

I'm planning on running informal polls about once a month. The first Poll of the Month (POTM) is to vote for your favorite single-winner voting system. The candidates are:

• Approval voting
• Borda count
• Bucklin system
• Condorcet voting
• Coombs method
• Instant runoff voting
• Other
• Plurality voting
• Range voting

You can vote in the poll here.

Fair Vote Canada Newsletter
September 6, 2011

Jack Layton, 1950 -- 2011

Aug 22, 2011
It is with great sadness that Fair Vote Canada mourns the loss of a friend . We send our heartfelt condolences to his wife Olivia Chow, his children Michael and Sarah, and to his “extended family” of Canadians. Jack was of course, always a proponent for proportional representation, and we greatly appreciated his support. But, perhaps even more importantly, Jack inspired Canadians across the country to believe that with love, hope and optimism (and hard work) we can change the world. He has given all of us who work for the causes he believed in an important legacy to live up to.

Jack Layton on proportional representation:

As you can see, I updated the theme for the OpenSTV website. I apologize in advance for my poor design skills, and any suggestions for improving the design of the theme would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if you come across anything on the website that seems broken with the new theme.

With OpaVote, you can now add a poll widget to your own website that allows your visitors to vote in a ranked-choice voting election, download the ballots, and then count the votes with OpenSTV.

Here is an example: