Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Hi, I'm Dag Arneson, software developer in Eugene, Lane County resident and presently a candidate for Lane Library District Director. I've been interested in electoral system reform for a while, but only just getting started in the politics of it.

Towards the goals of increasing voter engagement by enabling voters to honestly express their preferences without incentives for voting strategically, and getting diverse viewpoints more accurately represented in government bodies, and because I believe it is important for a voting system to be easily understood by a lay-person, I support instant runoff voting and multi-member districts.

Hi Dag! Welcome! If you look over existing threads here, you'll see things explaining how traditional instant-runoff voting fails to remove incentives for strategic voting and can even reinforce 2-party dominance. Which is why many of us are promoting Score Runoff as an improved version of instant-runoff which solves the problems. I won't repeat the points here.

Happily, we've had very productive and respectful communication overall, and Loomio is a pretty useful tool. Glad to have you join us!

I've already been around this loomio group for a while, and it seems like I posted about myself already somewhere else, but no matter.

My name is Ben, and I'm a software engineer who believes in attacking the root of the problem and doing it right the first time. After the 2016 election, problems with our undemocratic electoral system became very apparent. My mission is to remove any communication barriers that stand between the people and their government. This means, among other things, ending partisan gerrymandering, replacing winner-take-all with proportional representation, and easing access to the ballot for all citizens.

Oh, and upgrading from plurality FPTP to any superior voting system, of course. :-)

My rallying cry is this: "Loudly and clearly, let the people speak." If that is also your creed, then you're in the right place.