Yesterday, the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of San Francisco's implementation of IRV.

The plaintiff's primary argument (a rather silly one, in my opinion) was that restricting voters to only three rankings was unconstitutional. The plaintiff's desired solution was not more rankings, but instead to limit each voter to one ranking (aka plurality voting). The Ninth Circuit's detailed opinion is an enjoyable read and thoroughly exposes the flaws of plaintiff's arguments.

The Proportional Representation Society of Australia has recently published a new issue of Quota Notes, its quarterly publication that has been on hiatus for a number of years.

This issue has five articles:

• State Elections in Victoria and NSW
• Restoration in District Magnitude for Tasmanian Assembly has been deferred
• May 2011 Referendum could replace UK’s First-past-the-post with Preferential Voting
• Queensland Local Government Electoral Inquiry
• First PRSA Honorary Life Members

I'm glad to see the revival of this publication and look forward to future issues.

Brian Wichmann, after many years of running the Voting Matters online journal, has passed the editorship on to Prof. Nicolaus Tideman. Brian's dedication to the journal over the years has been greatly appreciated by myself and countless others. I'm also happy to hear that Prof. Tideman is taking over, as he is known not only for his scholarly work, but also for his dedication to preferential voting systems.

Here is a summary of the papers in Issue 28:

EDIT: Because of bots creating fake accounts, I disabled the link to create an account. If you would like an account, please email me.

I've now set up the site so that you can create an account here. Creating an account allows you to create your own blog posts or to comment on blog posts by others. If I like your blog post, I'll even promote it to the front page.

Additional features may come in the future, such as a forum and allowing users to add and update content more generally on the site.

Please send ideas for how to make this site more useful to jeff.oneill at openstv.org.

A bug in voting software could be very disruptive. If a bug is found after a winner is announced, turmoil could arise within the organization, especially if a significant amount of time has passed.

OpenSTV is designed to minimize the possibility of bugs ocurring:

1. Testing. A former co-worker of mine wisely stated, "Each software bug is really two bugs. The bug itself and the failure of any test to catch the bug" (paraphrased). OpenSTV is extensively tested to ensure that any changes in the code do not change election results.