[EM] STV - the transferrable part is OK (fair), the sequential round elimination is not

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

James Gilmour wrote:
> Kristofer Munsterhjelm  > Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 3:27 PM
>>> Juho wrote:
>>> If one really wants a two-party system and doesn't want voters to  change
>>> that fact then one could ban third parties and accept only two. That 
>>> would solve the spoiler problem :-). 
>> Who is this "one"? Since that one is at odds with the voters, 
>> that's not very democratic, is it?
>>
>> I guess that one "democratic" way of doing it would be to have the 
>> question itself posed to the voters, but with a suitable low-pass filter 
>> (e.g. supermajority required to change it, or a majority over a long 
>> time); though then I think it'd be better just to have the 
>> filter on the decision process itself.
> 
> Why in any country that would merit the description "democracy" would
> you want to impose a "two-party system" when the votes of the
> voters showed that was not what they wanted?

That is my question, too. The only way I see that there might be a 
conflict is with long term versus short term, hence the 
filtering/supermajority idea; but then I considered, since more parties 
provide a greater variety of opinions, then if short-term populism is a 
problem, it'd be better to put the supermajority/consensus requirements 
into the decision process rather than on the question of how many 
parties one should have.