[EM] [MG] Public parties: a Trojan Horse in the party system

[Ed Pastore]

Responding to Michael's full response to me, below. I guess I don't get how the system then takes hold in the public consciousness. We know build-it-and-they-will-come doesn't really work most of the time for this sort of thing. We need a really compelling motivation.

I think what might help here is if you present an elevator pitch for the whole concept. If you're not familiar, the idea is you are in an elevator with a significant person and have until you get to her floor to introduce yourself and sell your idea to her. In written form, that means something like a paragraph. Can you encapsulate the whole idea that way? That may make it easier for people to wrap their minds around the whole general concept, and then perhaps the particulars will sort themselves out internally...

(Note, elevator pitches can be quite hard to develop. There's a famous Pascal line at the end of a long missive that translates basically to: "I made this letter very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.")


On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:00 PM, Michael Allan wrote:

> Ed said,
>> ...  I think I get stuck here:
>> 
>>> The public party strives to increase its primary turnout by all
>>> means.  This includes mirroring the votes of would-be competitors
>>> (other public parties) such that turnout is effectively pooled
>>> among them. *
>> 
>> How can this mirroring be accomplished without duplication of votes?
>> Most current formal elections (including primaries) are anonymous,
>> and rely on a controlled registration process. If you are
>> aggregating these controlled elections along with less-controlled
>> input from many other sources, isn't it possible for some people to
>> vote many times (or at least twice), while others with less
>> energy/time/knowledge/etc. would have fewer votes (or perhaps just
>> one)?
> 
> Yes, that's correct.  We cannot image anonymous votes.  We must know
> the identity of the voter and the time at which the vote was cast.
> Only the latest vote is valid.
> 
>> Alternately, if the anonymous election is assumed to always be
>> redundant with other mirrored systems, then isn't it meaningless to
>> the vote mirror?
> 
> I think an anonymous primary (political party) is meaningless as far
> as its votes are concerned.  But the voters, nominees and candidates
> are valuable.  The public parties want the voters for sake of turnout,
> and they use the nominees and candidates to attract them.
> 
> The anonymous official election (state) is meaningful for executing
> the decision of the public primaries.  Private individuals will carry
> the decision across with their ballots.
> 
> Outside of these two places, anonymous voting seems unlikely to be
> important or common.  It's kind of boring, so it probably won't be
> competitive with public methods when people have a choice.