[EM] [RangeVoting] A Voter's Eye View

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:04 PM 2/14/2007, Dave Ketchum wrote:
>       Plurality NEEDS Primaries to avoid having multiple related
>candidates competing.  While other methods may also use
>primaries, primaries provide less value for them.

While it's true that primaries reduce the clone problem for 
Plurality, that problem is more generally soluble just by cooperation 
between candidates with similar views. Primaries are more directly 
what they purport to be: a method for determining what candidate the 
whole machinery and resources of a political party will support.

There are lots of us who think that government should get out of the 
primary business. I'm a bit suspicious of the hand of government 
meddling in the process by which political parties determine whom to 
support. Rather, if people don't like how a party chooses its 
candidates, let the people switch to a party which does better, or 
create one. And let parties pay for their own primaries. (If the 
state requires primaries, it must pay for them.)

The assumption seems to be that third parties can't function well 
when Plurality is the method; it's true (mostly) when parties think 
of themselves only as means of putting up candidates. But a party can 
do quite well without, necessarily, running its own candidates. New 
York has Fusion Voting, which simply means that any party may list 
any candidate as *their* candidate. Thus, where multiple parties 
which choose a single candidate have ballot privileges (based on 
prior votes or signatures, I presume), the same candidate appears 
more than once. By voting under the banner of your favorite party, 
you indicate support for the party as well as the candidate.

It provides an alternative to the spoiler effect. And when a party 
can show that it delivered votes, it can then exercise influence. 
What it gives today, it could take away tomorrow. Politicians tend to 
listen to large, organized voting blocks.

In 2000, I half expected Nader to, at the last minute, withdraw and 
suggest that his supporters vote for Gore, but send $5 to the Green 
Party in his name, saying that they would have voted for him. Fat 
chance. But it would have advanced the Green Party cause far more 
than the debacle that ensued. And the money would have been better.

Fusion Voting was on the ballot as an initiative this last November. 
For some reason, there was not extensive public debate. The ballot 
arguments presented by the opposition were the usual sound-bite 
deception I've come to expect in ballot arguments in general. Voters 
will be confused, we don't need this, etc. What is odd to me is that 
Progressives and Libertarians here did not get noisily and publicly behind it.