To the Editor:
I was pleased to see professor emeritus Robert Norman weigh in on the trustee voting system ("A Superior Voting System," Oct. 17). I have seen the change from approval voting to partial preference justified on the grounds that approval voting is "confusing" and "inequitable." I challenge both assertions.
The first assertion is nothing short of embarrassing. The electorate in trustee elections is sufficiently educated to understand approval voting. We ought not to throw up our hands and say "Too confusing!" when three or four short sentences are all it takes to explain the whole process.
As for inequity, approval voting is not immune from it. As professor Norman explained, Arrow proved that to be impossible. Rank-ordering and instant-runoff systems, however, are known to be more prone to specific inequities that are more likely and more severe than those that can occur with approval voting. Therefore, moving to partial preference is more likely to increase inequity than to cure it.
If there is a practical problem with approval voting in trustee elections, then there should be a pattern of provably inequitable results from past contests, and there should be an analysis of the specific conditions unique to trustee elections that expose a weakness in approval voting. I must therefore ask: what is the specific justification for the claim of inequitable results? What specific elections have had inequitable results, and what is it about the way these elections are conducted that has gone wrong?
