[EM] Populism and Voting Theory

[Raph Frank]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Brian Olson <bql at bolson.org> wrote:
> But hey, follow your passion. There are plenty of good things to do and we
> should do them all and I think we're most effective when we're working on
> what we personally care most about and in coalition with the right allies
> even if they're focusing on different aspects of the movement.

Well, being Irish, I don't have to do anything, since we already have
PR-STV :).  Though if I was bothered, maybe I would try to have the
constituency sizes increased.

However, that is also sorta happening automatically too.  Gormley is
the Minister for the Enviroment (responsible for setting the election
boundary guidelines) and Green Party (i.e. a small party) leader and
he has modified them so that the constituency commission should aim
for larger constituencies for the council elections.  Some of the
supporters of the larger parties have called it "Gormley-mandering"
... because more proportionality is clearly evil.  Ofc, they
officially object to the loss of local representation (which moving
from a 3 seater to a 5 seater clearly weakens).

> I'm still going for changing single-winner election methods as the biggest
> change, and likely biggest bang-per-buck we can get out of changes to work
> on.

Hopefully, improved electoral methods would help dull the benfits of
gerrymandering and increase the risks.

The majority party in a two party system have a large incentive to
gerrymander as its members are guaranteed to win the gerrymandered
districts.

Given that voters would have more power to remove legislators with
better voting systems, this is potentially higher risk as it makes
your party look dishonest.

Also, if no party has an outright majority it becomes harder still.