[EM] Oregon legislature approves ballot measure for ranked choice voting

[Richard Lung]

Electoral reform means reform of the vote and reform of the count. It is 
indeed a promising sign that the United States is moving to the 
necessary reform of the vote, with ranked choice voting. In contrast to 
Europe which can only think of a proportional reform of the count. This, 
too, is necessary but only in conjunction with ranked choice voting, to 
liberate the voters freedom of election from party control.

Anglo-American monopolistic elections still hamper democracy from the 
"elective dictatorship" of presidential systems. The British Cabinet is 
essentially "Prime Ministerial Government" as John Mackintosh concluded 
in his book on The British Cabinet. Basically "elective dictatorship" by 
todays world leaders is no further forward than the ancient Greek 
tyranny, as a deficient conception of democracy, and appears to be a 
largely ineffective check on war.

I would suggest something like the 9-member Cambridge city elections as 
an approximation to a US presidential election, with the president as 
most prefered candidate and chairman.

  I note the 3-member STV constituencies in 4 districts, in Portland 
Oregon. This would indeed be an improvement (reducing the importance of 
eliminative counting by introducing a proportional count. Winnipeg, 3rd 
largest city in Canada, had this arrangement. Much better was its 
previous arrangement in the 1941 elections, of a single 12-member 
constituency. So powerful a source of voter information was it, that 
sociologists used the election to analyse the ethnic vote. That is 
because a transferable vote in a sufficiently large constituency allows 
voters freedom to personally prefer and proportionally represent 
candidates on all social factors, and not just party. ---John Stuart 
Mill did not call proportional representation personal representation, 
for nothing.

RCV is a step in the right direction but the debate should not be 
focused on the best form of eliminative counting. (This ill-advised 
policy decision violates information conservation and is a knowledgable 
dead-end.) The differences in eliminative count are tiny compared to 
increasing the proportionality of the count in multi-member constituencies.

This eliminative count mis-focus (or red herring) reminds me of a 
separate mis-focus of European electoral reform on party proportional 
representation instead of voter freedom of choice, which is a more 
obvious dictatorial threat to democracy.

Regards,

Richard Lung.