{"id":1808,"date":"2007-12-21T08:00:24","date_gmt":"2007-12-21T13:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2007-12-21T08:08:33","modified_gmt":"2007-12-21T13:08:33","slug":"1808","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1808","title":{"rendered":"Stopping Irv"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our friends at the Minnesota Voters Alliance – including regular NARN guest Andy Cilek – have taken the first step<\/a> in their battle to try to stop the Instant Runoff Voting juggernaut, which has already absorbed Minneapolis and threatens Saint Paul.<\/p>\n

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A group called the Minnesota Voters Alliance filed suit Thursday in Hennepin County District Court seeking to keep instant-runoff voting from starting up in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

The group’s lawyer, Erick Kaardal, cited an opinion from Attorney General Lori Swanson saying the system of ranking candidates by preference probably isn’t permitted by the state Constitution. That opinion, issued this year, stopped short of calling the system unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

Kaardal also referenced a 1915 state Supreme Court case that struck down a Duluth system that ranked candidates.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All the best to the Minnesota Voters Alliance.<\/p>\n

I have objections to Instant Runoff, too. But they’re not personal; it’s just business.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

Background: I analyze systems – software, hardware, processes, print publications, what have you – to empirically determine how *usable* they are.<\/p>\n

And speaking not as a partisan, but as a professional whose entire line of work involves figuring how to make things easier for real people to use, there’s a truism at work whenever people design systems; the designer *always* thinks he\/she has designed something
\nso intuitive that someone’d have to be an idiot not to be able to figure out how to do it. It’s true for programmers writing websites, for executives designing processes for other people, for engineers building freeway ramps, for architects designing public spaces; *everyone* designs things to be blazingly intuitive – to other programmers, executives, engineers or architects.<\/p>\n

And when those programmers, managers and engineers watch real people in controlled usability tests actually trying to do real-world things with those websites, processes, ramps and spaces, and making mistakes and doing things they were not intended to to, they tend to have one of the following reactions:<\/p>\n