Range Voting
Jan. 4th, 2007 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster,
sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."
I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.
WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.
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I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.
WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 10:57 am (UTC)Oh yeah, because that's sooooo likely to happen. EVERYONE would fail to show up. I think not. And if even a small number show up, they are going to form a pretty good statistical aproximation of the electorate, which is why it's a bit silly for people to worry too much about voter turn out. The more important issue is that voter turn-out is ideologically proportional to the electorate as a whole.
This would be roughly equivalent to everyone being so scared of flying that they all stay home and hide under the bed.
I will hand it to you, that's a very funny analogy, but doesn't correlate well to reality. Say even half the normal amount of voters showed up (which would be a big impact), but they used a much better voting system - the electorate as a whole would be very likely to be more pleased. Heck, even if 1/100th of the electorate showed up, that would happen, statistically speaking. Polls can get a 95% confidence interval with just a few thousand respondents. It's been so long since stats I don't remember the exact equation as a function of margin of error but, I know it doesn't take that many voters to get very high levels of accuracy.
And we actually have found evidence that Range Voting will increase voter turnout. This is because, by looking at historical election patterns, we've found patterns such as, people tend to show up in much greater numbers when there is a very large difference in how much they like the options. If they hate them both, or love them both, they don't turn out in large numbers. But man, if the candidates are more polarized, the numbers go up by a lot. Because Range Voting gives more candidates a realistic chance of winning (makes it contentious between lots of candidates, rather than between just a couple) we have reason to believe it would have a large effect on voter turnout, based on that psychology. That's a little off topic for your uses, but interesting nontheless.
I'm skeptical of your analogy here, by the way. You're assuming people to be far more rational than I think they are.
Oh no, believe me, I don't think people are very rational at all! My point isn't that they'll understand that Range Voting is better, but that it is better.
Personally, I'd rather take the train if I could, but I rarely have enough time to do so.
Yeah, I see your Amtrack logo. I live in Seattle and I want to take it down to Portland some time for the heck of it.
My wife detests flying so much that she'll only do it unless there is no other practical possibility.
Hah! She's like me. Irrational paranoia of flying. It's my one irrational vice.
She even researched taking a ship to this year's Worldcon in Japan, but gave it up as too expensive. But I digress.
She should ship herself as cargo in a big wooden box. That's the economical way to go.
CLAY