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

[Richard Fobes]

Welcome!

An excellent summary of the collective view of most participants here is 
our recently created "Declaration of Election-Method Reform Advocates". 
  It doesn't yet have a permanent home; a temporary copy is here:

http://www.votefair.org/declaration.html

Your views overlap with many of ours, yet you will meet some resistance 
to some of your positions.  The above Declaration will quickly convey 
which areas are which.

Please ask any specific questions.

Richard Fobes


On 10/30/2011 6:33 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
> 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
>