[EM] Re: the simplest election reform

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:10 PM 6/16/2005, Araucaria Araucana wrote:
>You all are missing the point of my original question.
>
>Abd advocates allowing overvotes to instantly enable approval voting.
>
>But sneaking approval in this way

I'm certainly not recommending "sneaking." Rather, as part of the reform 
process, fixing the overvote rule, I'd make it clear that this would 
implement Approval voting, but in a mild and gentle way that would not 
necessarily change people's voting habits, at least not immediately. Change 
would be gradual, most likely.

>doesn't solve the more general
>problem of eliminating the primary.  I *do* want to eliminate the
>primary, since it is merely an artifact of plurality/SVFPP.

I agree that primaries are part of the problem. But I'm not putting my 
major efforts into solving the political party problem, but into solving 
the overall organizational problem. If we can find a way to create 
organizations that are trustworthy by design, to communicate, coordinate, 
and foster cooperation, we can control the parties. By "we," of course, I 
don't mean what some political activists mean, "me and those who agree with 
me." I really do mean creating a fully democratic process, which I trust, 
*if properly structured*, will produce better results than I could, myself, 
even imagine.

And then we could talk a lot about what "properly structured" means. And I 
very much invite discussion of this or of any related topics on the 
BeyondPolitics wiki, http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki

Certainly I have some ideas. But hopefully the results will be much better 
than my own ideas. But if nobody is working on the metaproblem.... we'll be 
pushing that rock up the hill again.

>So sure, I say go ahead and allow overvoting.  But don't lose sight of
>the end goal.

Indeed.