[EM] Competitive Districting Rule

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:42 AM 7/19/2006, Jan Kok wrote:

>This is quite surprising to me. American third parties would kill to
>get a few percent of the votes and a couple seats in Congress. Why
>have third parties been so much more successful in the UK?

Because in the U.S., the obstacle to overcome is overwhelming, and 
the third party does considerable damage if it tries to get there and fails.

In order to get a rep in Congress, it must win in a district, which 
requires a plurality in that district. Only a party with strong 
support in some district has a chance of winning, which is rare. It 
does happen, though, if I am correct, with locally-based parties, so 
occasionally there is a rep in Congress from some wild party, which 
really does not make much difference nationally. And there are some 
independents; again, these are people with strong local support.

Problem is, running a candidate, if you don't win, but you are on 
your way to having enough votes to win, is quite likely to cause the 
least-favored of the two major party candidates to win. Think the 
Green Party and Bush/Gore 2000. Had Nader not drawn off votes, Gore 
would have taken Florida easily, and I don't think that similar 
strategic voting by other parties would have had as much effect. (I'm 
not sure, but the analysis clearly applies in the situation described 
-- third party becoming a significant percentage of the vote). I 
suspect that the Green Party was seriously damaged by that outcome -- 
perhaps the 2004 results show that.)

In any case, this effect would be the cause of the principle that 
plurality, single-winner tends to a 2-Party system. It would not 
apply if the third parties strongly encourage their members *not* to 
vote for a party candidate, or the party can maintain a ballot 
position for a candidate already on the ballot for another party. 
This is allowed in New York, and it is the rarity of this tweak that 
causes this to not have much national effect. In other words, 
allowing the same candidate to appear in multiple positions fixes the problem.

But, of course, the 2 major parties think that things are peachy-keen 
as they are. I think the Democrats may be waking up to the fact that 
this can seriously hurt them. Indeed, status quo is more likely to 
damage the *most popular* of the two major parties, because that 
party is more likely to split! But they don't seem to realize this....

Thus additional parties have a large obstacle to overcome, unless 
they are willing to sacrifice ballot position. Still if party members 
were willing to donate $5 to the party when they vote for a major 
party candidate, the situation would be remedied. In other words, 
there are extragovernmental methods of overcoming the problem. Of 
course, FA/DP would do it too.