Utter nonsense. To paraphrase:

Any election system that favors unrepresentative candidates [like IRV] would be considered unreasonable; the same rationale must be applied to one that favors representative candidates.

Uh, no. That doesn't follow.

FairVote starts from the conclusion that IRV is the best voting method, and then works backwards to try to justify it, in this case arguing that a flaw of IRV is actually a feature, by making a false equivalent between a voting system that favors unrepresentative candidates and one that favors representative candidates.

The whole point of an election is to find the most-representative candidate.

Yes, candidates who are moderate relative to the voters should always win.

The goal of an election is to find the candidate who best represents the electorate. If the electorate is left-wing on average, the winner should be too. If the electorate is "strong on both personal freedoms and economic freedoms", then the winner should be too.

Anything else is undemocratic.

This isn't true. It's possible for a Condorcet candidate to be extremist relative to the other candidates or the electorate, since weak preferences are given equal weight to strong preferences. Simple example here:

This is true, but IRV doesn't choose the candidate who is most-liked (the "utilitarian winner"), either.

The bias that has been cited by critics wishing to undermine the general argument of this article (and similar articles, blogs, social media claims, etc), is that figures being shared for expenditures on non-teaching staff are misleading because they include funding positions such as nurses who are in schools every day providing vital services directly to students. I believe this is critique is factual.

On the other hand, there are claims that the total amount spent on administrative staff is dramatically under-reported as DPS classifies certain staff as school-based who in fact serve in roles that are central admin in nature. Whether this is intentional deception or aligned with standard accounting practices probably depends on who you ask. Either way, I believe this claim is also true. At the risk of offering annotations that qualify as "what aboutism" I include the point here because it is possible that the amounts that critics cite as being spent on staff that do not interact with students may actually be significantly less than what DPS is actually spending.

In an age of shrinking News Room budgets, there is huge power to having a strong Communications department as reporters of local news can be reduced to writers who are expected to crank out an unrealistic amount of content and therefore rely on press releases for turnkey stories. I have first-hand knowledge of this dynamic: when I worked a marketing internship, I saw my exact language appear in the local paper under a reporter's byline multiple times.

While there is clear benefit to the District's administration when it comes to exerting ownership of the public narrative, it is worth asking how this serves students and whether it is in fact in the public's best interest to use public funds in order to manipulate the news coverage the public relies on for learning about the district's efficacy in educating area youth.

Under range/score, the best strategy to promote the election of a preferred candidate is always to give that candidate the maximum score and then give every other competitor the minimum score.

Yeah, this is false.

If you have perfect knowledge of how everyone else is voting (and you usually don't), then the best strategy is to give a maximum score to the frontrunner that you prefer, and also to everyone you like more than them, and to likewise give a minimum score to the other frontrunner, and to everyone you dislike more.

This is not bullet voting; it's equivalent to Approval Voting, and leads to more moderate winners who are good representatives of the electorate.

Real-world Score elections don't show this behavior, anyway, because polls are imprecise and the consequences of voting honestly under Score aren't as dire as they are under FPTP or IRV.

Rebuttal to [the original version of] this page at https://www.equal.vote/fv

This is nonsense. All voting systems are subject to tactical voting.

The "Norman yoke" was a term English nationalists in the middle of the 17th century used to describe oppressive elements of feudalism introduced by William the Conqueror.

The simplification of Japanese kanji was done to a lesser extent than that of the Chinese hanzi.

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Radical change will be uncomfortable. If we don't push for change, we will spend another decade becoming less relevant.

Week 14 Video Lecture

Video Study Questions:

What shift occurs in evangelical religion from the 1700s to the 1800s? How does this shift change the view of sin?

What is significant about David Walker's Appeal? What is the response to it?

What is immediatism? What shift does it reflect?

Is this just becoming more of a competition between who ends up with control? I thought we were working towards beneficial social and urban reform here..