[EM] electoral college/ two-party-duopoly

[Curt Siffert]

Hi, new subscriber - I'm glad this list is turning out to be tolerant 
to discussing election method subjects other than Condorcet approaches. 
  I have a more general question about the Electoral College (EC).

Due to the fact that the EC requires a majority (not plurality) to win 
outright, and due to the winner-take-all nature of the states, this is 
how the EC encourages a two-party system.

To me though it appears there are two issues with the EC.  One is its 
strength of implementation and its vulnerability to side effects.  For 
one thing, it pretty much seems to require a plurality-voting approach, 
inviting all the problems we're aware of with plurality counting.  But 
the other issue is the validity of (some of) the intent behind the 
Electoral College.  While the first issue is in my mind clearly flawed, 
the second is much more open to debate to me.

[ The first issue really illustrates what I find so impossible about 
IRV advocates, because many of them advocate IRV *in presidential 
elections*, but *before* removing the EC.  Implementing IRV in pres. 
elections on a state level, without changing the EC, has *no* effect 
whatsoever, save to increase the chances of the election just being 
sent to the House of Representatives.  It's this reason alone that 
leads me to find much of the pro-IRV reasoning bizarre. ]

Back to my question.  Some of the intent behind the EC - or, should I 
say, some of the perceived benefits of it - are stability in 
government.  Sure, perhaps too stable, but I personally do find it a 
hard argument to make that a multiple-party legislative body is clearly 
and incontrovertibly better than a two-party legislative body.  When I 
see the nature of some of the power-sharing alliance agreements in some 
parliamentary bodies with many small parties, it doesn't seem to do a 
much better job of democratically representing the population than a 
two-party body (this reaches the outer limits of my study and I don't 
have many examples to draw on; the only one I find myself thinking of 
in this regard is Israel's).

So when I'm faced with the spin of a two-party system demanding 
stability, and thus requiring that all third parties fashion alliances 
before legislative elections rather than after, I don't really have a 
convincing rebuttal.  It seems to me that these alliances would have to 
happen sometime, because most legislative issues come down to an 
up-or-down vote.

It just begs the question for me - if there were other ways to make 
sure third parties had better representation earlier in the system, and 
there were other reforms enacted, if we could solve those problems in 
different ways, then is this facet of a two-party system really all 
that much of a flaw?  Perhaps these third parties just require better 
representation within their favorite of the two main parties.

In short, is it not possible to simply reform the two-party duopoly 
rather than get rid of it entirely?

Curt