David — Thanks for the info. I’ll join up and see how I can get involved in LA! Though I’m hoping to move to Santa Monica soon –

LAVoteFIRE is active in a few cities in LA County. Currently, Burbank is our best shot at getting some sort of Instant Runoff elections soon, because they are in the middle of a charter review process, and it seems the members of the Charter Review Committee don’t like having to spend 6 extra Saturdays knocking on doors because there’s a second round in Council elections. If you live in Burbank and can help, please email me, dh@lavotefire.org.

The County Supervisors control the eventual outcome here, because they buy almost all of the voting equipment used in elections, local thru fed, in the County. Demand for “customer service” from municipalities might sway them. Also, there is an upcoming Supervisor vacancy that could result in a two-round election, which might annoy people and prompt reexamination of the two-round county system.

Other cities LAVoteFIRE is focusing on include Los Angeles and Santa Monica. We tried and failed in Culver City.

A task force from the San Fernando Valley Alliance for Democracy will be helping with lobbying L.A. City Hall in April.

There’s a separate effort going on in Pasadena that I can tell you about if you live there and email me.

Thanks, Lisa, for the nice compliment and alerting me to this blog.

:-) d

Monotonicity is perhaps the most fundamental criterion for election methods. Common sense tells us that good election methods should be monotonic. Methods that fail to comply are erratic.

A simple example will prove that IRV is non-monotonic.

That same site approves of “approval voting.” Another option proposed by that site (which, by the way, is electionmethods.org) is condorcet voting. The main idea is that each race is conceptually broken down into separate pairwise races between each possible pairing of the candidates. Each ranked ballot is then interpreted as a vote in each of those one-on-one races. If candidate A is ranked above candidate B by a particular voter, that is interpreted as a vote for A over B. If one candidates beats each of the other candidates in their one-on-one races, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the result is ambiguous and a simple procedure is used to resolve the ambiguity.

http://www.electionmethods.org/index.htm

David Holtzman, a wonderful Democrat, btw, founded the organization.

Several LA Greens and others lobbied with David at LA city councilmember offices last fall.
I’ll shoot an email over to David and ask him to give us an update.

Lisa Taylor
http://losangelesgreens.org/