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

[Michael Allan]

Welcome David,

Richard Fobes wrote:
> An excellent summary of the collective view of most participants
> here is our recently created "Declaration of Election-Method Reform
> Advocates". ...

Mind you, most of us have yet to agree to this collective view.  That
doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong or anything, but it may yet prove
to be!  I just mention this to show that we're still, for the most
part, open minded on the question. :-)

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/


Richard Fobes wrote:
> 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