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[NOTE: The Electoral Reform Society has a mostly fine record of promoting Instant run-off voting in multi-member wards, known in the UK as Single Transferrable Voting, which combines proportionality with giving voters power to number our preferences. However the Society has recently become enamoured (suckered) by the 'modernisation' mystification for elections, at least in so far as it is prepared to accept the poisoned challice of STV coming bundled with E-counting, as has just been achieved (?) in Scotland. The link derives from the coomplex nature of many STV counts, which supposedly requires the introduction of e-counting technology, even though more decentralised counts (which mobilise citizen involvement/invigilation and publicly phone the result of each stage through to the publicly-watched count administrators) could whip through even many stages of counting and re-allocating preferences within a day.

It may or may not be related that the Society derives £1m a year from its lucrative balloting arm, Election Reform Services, Ltd, which is market leader in distance voting for civil society elections, and handled the postal votes in the Scottish elections. At all event the Society's rather poor position paper http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Electronic%20voting%20POLICY.pdf makes a big distinction between statutory ('public) elections and civil society elections (called 'private') , which are exempted from its rather weak strictures on e-technology, even though civil society organisations can be the object of intense secret manipulations and collectively are recognised by democratic theory to be vital for the health of democracies.]

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