From an email I received today:
Subject "Did you know this?"
"A new voting method called cumulative voting. I promise you won’t believe this even after you’ve seen this with your own eyes and heard it with your own ears. You’ll just stare with your mouth wide open. Bye, bye Constitution . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHbdc8Q_3Ek "
My response:
"First let me point out that cumulative voting is used in many corporations to elect their Board of Directors. Cumulative voting is also used in over 50 communities across the US to elect people to City Council, School Board and Board of Regents positions, to name a few. All cumulative voting is is another commonly used method of voting.
Say there are 3 school board positions open and five nominees and you get assigned 3 total votes. You can use all of your 3 votes on your very favorite school board nominee, or you could use one each for your three favorites. At the end of the election, the votes for each school board nominee are counted. The one with the highest number wins a position. The one with the second highest number wins a position. The one with the third highest number wins a position. The other two have lost the election. It is simply a much more efficient way of electing people to fill a large number of open positions (more than one).
Alternative election methods have often been demonized by politicians. Typically those who have been in office for a long time. It is probably because alternative election methods skew their numbers and make it a little harder for entrenched politicians to "game the system". It throws their polling numbers off. Alternative election methods also tend to allow lesser-funded candidates (read: candidates that don't have big corporate or political donors) to have a real chance at winning.
So the fact that Fox News is running a segment demonizing the use of a rather benign alternative voting method doesn't surprise me. Any more than it would surprise me if MSNBC ran a similar segment. It is just politics as usual."
