[EM] Declaration of Election-Method Experts and Enthusiasts

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Dave Ketchum wrote:
> I look at this and shake my head.  I am not used to parties having the 
> kind of control implied here - let alone evil control.  But the evil 
> control could exist in other states.
> 
> Then I look at what has been written in our declaration.  I see nothing 
> for:
> .     Who can be a voter - most any adult.
> .     Who can be a candidate - most any voter.
> .     What about primary elections?  Nothing said inconsistent with 
> voters joining a party, seeing to candidates for primaries and voting in 
> primaries.
> 
> Why do we have primaries?  With FPTP, multiple candidates from a party 
> in the main election could be a disaster.  If parties had the power some 
> imply, they could attend to this by preventing multiple party candidates 
> from being in the main election.

I imagine that, were the election method cloneproof, the parties would 
still try to nominate a single candidate so as to concentrate all its 
promotion power on that single candidate. Whether the party would 
succeed in doing so depends on the amount of power it has.

To my knowledge, the US does not have an explicit party-based system, 
and therefore, the parties can't use formal power to keep anyone from 
running outside of the party itself. In closed-list PR countries, the 
parties *do* have formal power, because the election method is oriented 
primarily around parties and not around candidates.

However, even if the parties do not have formal power, parties have 
informal advantages, namely organization and money. A contest favors 
those who are prepared - and since representative democracy consists of 
such contests (every election), those who can coordinate more effort (be 
it monetary or organizatorial) towards being heard will, well, be heard 
better and so gain more votes, all other things equal.

The alternate approaches, like Gohlke's Practical Democracy - or for 
that matter, sortition or (to a lesser extent) delegable proxy - makes 
"marketing" less important because the system picks from a random subset 
that is unlikely to coincide with party membership (Practical Democracy, 
sortition), or the continuous bidirectional nature of the system means 
that one can appeal to a small group and still influence politics, and 
that groups have an incentive to remain small (delegable proxy).