What You Can Do

You can go to ApprovalVoting.org and join the Citizens for Approval Voting.

You can spread the word about the benefits of Approval Voting and refer your colleagues, friends, and family to ApprovalVoting.org and ElectionMethods.org.

You can tell members and supporters of "minor" parties that our current plurality voting system stacks the deck against them and that Approval Voting is their best hope by far for getting their candidates elected.

Finally, you can engage the supporters of IRV (Instant Runoff Voting) in a friendly debate. Despite their dedication and good intentions, they may actually be hurting the cause of electoral reform for single-winner elections, and they need to know that.

Many IRV advocates are more interested in proportional representation (PR) for multi-winner elections (for legislative and governing bodies) than they are in single-winner elections (for President, Senator, Governor, etc.). Hence many of them are unaware of, or uninterested in, the gross defects of IRV, and they have been fooled into thinking it will help minor parties win. As we have shown at this site, it is very unlikely to do that.

We at EMERG believe, based on objective analysis, that the best single-winner election method is Condorcet (the version explained elsewhere at this site), followed by Approval Voting. We realize, however, that Condorcet Voting will not be implemented anytime soon. A consensus in favor of Condorcet voting has not even been reached among the experts, let alone the general public, and that could take decades if it ever happens at all. The public certainly has a right to be skeptical about a revolutionary method of conducting elections, and that skepticism will take decades to overcome. Condorcet Voting also requires expensive new voting equipment, and its implementation will not be practical until every single voting station where it will be used is equipped.

Approval Voting is, therefore, the only practical alternative for the foreseeable future. As we have explained elsewhere at this site, it requires no new voting equipment, no complicated procedure for counting the votes, and the change to the voting rules is trivial. Yet it will have a revolutionary impact on our political system by giving "minor" parties a fair chance to compete and become major parties.

The supporters of IRV are doubly mistaken. First, they think that IRV is better than Approval Voting, but we have demonstrated by objective analysis that it is not even as good. But even if IRV were technically superior to Approval Voting, it would still be much more difficult to get accepted and implemented. The same difficulties discussed above for Condorcet Voting apply to IRV. Like Condorcet, IRV involves a relatively complicated vote-counting procedure, and it requires new voting equipment in every voting station where it will be used. Like Condorcet, IRV will take at least several decades to get implemented, and that would be true even if IRV were as good as Condorcet (it's not even close).

By insisting on IRV and refusing to settle for the much simpler Approval Voting, IRV advocates are obstructing rather than facilitating progress in single-winner electoral reform. And that would be true even if IRV were technically superior to Approval, but it isn't anyway. They need to be made aware of this fact so they can get on the real road to progress or at least quit leading people astray into a dead end. They need to be engaged politely but assertively by people like you. Get involved!

ElectionMethods.org