[EM] A structural fault in society owing to a design flaw in the electoral system

[Warren Smith]

> Michael Allan:
http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht
"An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the
election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same
regardless. This appears to open a structural fault in society between
the individual person and the individual vote. The voter as such (as a
decider) is thus alienated from the means and product of decision, and
thereby disengaged from political power and freedom. I argue that the
sum of these disengagements across the population amounts to a power
vacuum, which, in mid to late Victorian times, led to the effective
collapse of the electoral system and the rise of a mass party system.
Today, the organized parties make the decisions and exercise the
political power that was intended for the individual voters. I trace
these failures back to a technical design flaw in the electoral system
..."

--REPLY:
Theories need to be judged via experiment.
A massive experimental refutation of this entire thesis would seem to
be the fact that honeybees have been highly successfully using
range-voting elections for millions of years:
http://rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html

However, despite this immensity of time and the immensity of the
number of elections (hundreds of trillions !!!) they've
held, honeybees still have not reached "the effective collapse of the
electoral system and the rise of a mass party system."

Note, honeybee experimental evidence vastly outweighs human election
experience, vastly outweighs all data Michael Allan has ever seen in
his life, etc.

So.   Either
(a) Michael Allan's whole set of ideas is just wrong.
(b) Range voting (which the honeybees use) is somehow different and allows
escaping Michael Allan's ideas (which could still be right for some
other voting systems such as plurality).
(c) having political parties somehow would be beyond the ability of
honeybees, even though
range voting is not beyond their ability; and even though with humans
at present political
parties are within their ability but range voting is beyond it.

MORE EVIDENCE is the fact that various other human countries
apparently never got important political parties
despite centuries of elections.  E.g. Venice, which also used range voting:
http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html

Michael Allan completely ignores this evidence, which kind of
indicates his great scholarly contribution
to political science... falls a bit short.

-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)