[EM] hello from DLW of "A New Kind of Party":long time electoral reform enthusiast/iconoclast-wannabe...

[David L Wetzell]

I just joined the list.

I'm a political economist turned electoral enthusiast.

My views are:
1. All modern democracies are unstable mixtures of popular democracy and
plutocracy.
2. Electoral Reform is meant to bolster the former.
3. There are two basic types of election rules: winner-take-all (all
single-seat elections or non-proportional multi-seat) elections and
 winner-doesn't-take-all (proportional or quasi-proportional multi-seat)
elections.  We need to use both.  Right now, in the US, we need most
to push for more American forms of PR.
4. American forms of PR don't challenge the fact we have a two-party
dominated system.  They tend to have 3-5 seats.  They increase
proportionality
and handicap the cut-throat competitive rivalry between the two major
parties.  They give third party dissenters more voice...
5. Most alternatives to FPTP are decent and the biases of FPTP tend to get
reduced over time and place in elections.
6. I advocate for FairVote's IRV3.  It's got a first-mover and marketing
advantage in the US, over the infinite number of other single seat
winner-take-all election rules out there.  In a FPTP dominated system,
there can only be one alternative to FPTP at a time locally.
6b. I think that IRV3 can be improved upon by treating the up to three
ranked choices as approval votes in a first round to limit the number of
candidates to three then the rankings of the three can be sorted into 10
categories and the number of votes in each category can be summarized at
the precinct level.
7. Moreover, I believe that the number of political issues, their
complexity, matters of character bound the rationality of voters and make
choices among candidates inherently fuzzy options.  So there's no cardinal
or ordinal utility for any candidate out there and all effective rankings
of candidates used to determine the Condorcet Candidate are ad hoc.
8. This is why I believe a lot of the debate over the best single seat
election rule is unproductive.
9. What matters more is to get a better balance between the two basic types.
10.  Winner-doesn't-take-all elections are preferable for "more local"
elections that o.w. tend to be chronically non-competitive.

I think that's probably enough for now.
I look forward to dialogues with y'all (I lived in TX from 3-9 then moved
to MN, where my father became a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at
the private liberal arts college where he met my mother, Bethel
University.).

dlw
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