[EM] affects of IRR(V) and meaning of democracy

[Dave Ketchum]

Dr.Ernie Prabhakar wrote later on Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:16:12 -0700, but I 
prefer to respond to the following.

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:19:17 EDT RLSuter at aol.com wrote:

> Steve Eppley writes:
> 
> 
>>Under IRR, on the other hand, parties would not have 
>>a strong incentive to nominate only one candidate, 
>>and there'd be strong incentives to nominate more than 
>>one: they could increase turnout of their supporters 
>>on election day by nominating a diversity, they could 
>>avoid the fratricide of primary fights, and they could
>>avoid putting all their eggs in one basket.
>>
> 
> I have doubts about that, Steve. Nominating more than one
> candidate would mean splitting the available campaign funding,
> plus it would make it more difficult for voters to become
> familiar with all the different candidates and decide which
> ones they prefer and in what order. Any voting method or
> other decision procedure must take into account the burdens
> it would place on voters or people involved in a carrying out
> a decision procedure. That's a problem most advocates of
> direct democracy have failed to address at all adequately.
> 
Goals:
     Good to let a party nominate more than one candidate, 
for you can then do away with primaries.  Also need to allow 
nominations outside the party system for starting new parties 
and responding to dissension within parties.
     Need to limit candidates to a quantity for which 
campaigning is affordable and for which it is practical for 
voters to evaluate candidates.
     Idea here is a democracy thought - keep quantity of candidates 
reasonable by letting voters control nomination.

Thoughts based on New York State election law:
     Base nomination is by petition, signed by 5% of the voters 
in the election district, each voter permitted to sign ONLY ONE 
petition for an office.  This gets:
        Wannabe candidates who are rotten lemons do not get signers.
        Theoretical limit is 20 candidates (practical limit much less).
     I assume any voter can sign any petition, but that loyal 
party members will sign party petitions.
     For districts with thousands of voters, petition requirement is 
set less than 5% - this works, for petitioning is hard work.
     Parties can make single nominations for some offices, such as 
governor.  Based on going exclusively for petitions not worth it here.

 I believe Ralph's words below agree with what precedes.
> 
>>Democracy is not about being fair to each 
>>voter, as one member of this list recently asserted 
>>during our discussion of the electoral college; it's 
>>about aligning the incentives of society's leaders 
>>with the well-being of the people.
>>
> 
> That's debatable as well. Democracy has always been
> understood as a general means for making decisions that
> affect everyone in a particular group or organization or
> polity. Alternatives to democracy (rule by the people) are
> anarchy (rule by no one), monarchy (rule by one individual),
> oligarchy  (rule by a politically privileged group of people),
> plutocracy (rule by the wealthy), aristocracy (rule by
> hereditary elites), and majority tyranny (rule by majorities
> with no minority rights). Other alternatives that have been
> proposed by political philosphers are polyarchy (Robert
> Dahl's term for rule by multiple interest groups engaged
> in complex patterns of competition and cooperation) and
> demarchy (John Burnheim's term for a system in which
> collective decisions of all kinds are made by many groups
> of different and in most cases specialized kinds that are
> chosen by random selection from among citizens.)
> 
> My preferred definition of democracy is "rule by all of the
> people," which requires (ideally, at least) that all people
> have equal collective decisionmaking power, or equal
> power to participate and determine the outcome of
> collective decisions about matters they care about and
> that affect them.
> 
> But no definition can do more than provide very rough
> guidelines about how decisions are to be made. The
> "devil is in the details" with regard to both democracy
> and all of its alternatives. I suspect  some forms of oligarchy
> or even monarchy would do a better job than some forms
> of democracy of "aligning the incentives of society's leaders
> with the well-being of the people." My own strong opinion
> is that good forms of democracy would do much better
> than any of democracy's alternatives but that no nation
> (and in particular, not the U.S.) has yet come close to
> adopting or creating the best possible democratic
> procedures and institutions. Better voting methods would
> contribute a lot, but they are far from all that is needed,
> and perhaps not what are most important. That is, better
> voting methods are, at most, necessary for improving
> democracy but far from sufficient.
> 
> -Ralph Suter

-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
                  If you want peace, work for justice.