[EM] What are the approaches you advocate for?

[Richard Fobes]

On 5/30/2013 12:44 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
>...
> dlw: If neither can dominate and we have some exit threat between them
> and away from them, possibly changing the specific two parties at the
> top or forcing them to merge with a growing (or regionally strong) third
> party, then it'll be easier to check the influence of special interests
> on both of them.
>...
> I also think that 3rd party aficionados will recognize that the
> imperative is to incorporate the use of PR asap so as to mitigate the
> cut-throat competition between the two major parties that prevents us
> from making progress on so many issues that desperately need change and
> to trust that as a result of the changed rules that both major parties
> would be seriously changed for the better even if their names do not change.

Rather than giving up on voter control of the Republican and Democratic 
parties, I want to increase voter influence on these two parties.  That 
is why I promote reforming *primary* elections.

I agree that third-party candidates should win often enough to indicate 
the extent to which the main parties (which could be more than two at a 
distant future time) fail to be controlled by the voters.

Privately David asked:
 > What are the approaches you advocate for?

For primary-election reform (which are single-winner contests) I promote 
VoteFair popularity ranking, which is mathematically equivalent to the 
Condorcet-Kemeny method.

(IRV cannot handle enough candidates for this purpose.  Approval voting 
would provide improvements here, but I'm not a supporter of approval 
voting for widespread use.)

For multi-winner use I promote VoteFair representation ranking.  It is 
unlike any other voting method I've seen.  Details are at:

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

(STV is inferior to this method.)

In addition I advocate the use of VoteFair party ranking to identify 
political-party popularity.  Those results would be used to allow the 
two most-representative parties to offer two candidates in each race, 
and would limit less-popular parties to either one or zero candidates in 
each race.

(IRV cannot handle this kind of general election.  Let's say it's a 
Congressional election in which there are two Republican candidates, two 
Democratic candidates, one Green-party candidate, one [whatever] 
candidate, and no additional candidates.)

To solve the gerrymandering problem I advocate using VoteFair 
representation ranking in double-size districts (to elect the two most 
representative candidates in each district), plus having some additional 
seats filled based on party-based proportionality. ...

... But choosing the candidate for the proportional seats would NOT be 
done using any kind of party list, and instead would be based on which 
district-based candidate lost in their district yet demonstrated he or 
she is the most popular candidate (of the specified party) compared to 
the other losing candidates (of that party) in the other districts.

The full approach includes providing for a smooth transition to better 
elections.  And the approach includes a proposed Constitutional 
amendment for reforming Presidential elections, which involves 
complications that IRV advocates don't seem to be aware of.

(IRV advocates seem to think that after adopting IRV in more places, the 
details for dealing with IRV's limitations [especially its inability to 
handle three somewhat-equally popular political parties] can be worked 
out later.)

Broadly speaking, in the context of this discussion with David about 
FairVote (not VoteFair) strategy, I do not see either FairVote or IRV 
advocates promoting a full election system that works together.

Instead I hear "let's use IRV here, and STV there, but stay with 
plurality voting there and there, and let's ignore the consequence of a 
third-party presidential candidate winning some electoral votes and 
preventing any candidate from winning a majority of electoral votes, and 
we're confident that everything will all work out."

IRV and STV have been tried elsewhere (notably Australia) and those 
governments are just as corrupt as the U.S. (single-mark-ballot-based) 
and European (PR-based) "election systems."

Ironically most IRV advocates say they want third parties to grow, yet 
IRV cannot handle more than (let's say) 3 main candidates in a general 
election, so that will lead to a dead end if there should turn out to be 
four main parties.

Richard Fobes