I've removed the Approval Voting address from the To: header since I'm banned there. Jan can forward this if he thinks it relevant to that list.
At 08:24 AM 6/11/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Right. However, the real problem is that it is hard to change the >voting >system as the current winners are exactly the people who do best under >the current (no matter which) system. This is the "persistence of inequities effect" that I've described so many times. If a structural characteristic gives excess power to some faction (incumbents in this case), that faction will resist change, and since the characteristic gives them excess power.... This is not necessarily a matter of greed for power. People who are in positions of excess authority often believe that this is quite proper and necessary for the benefit of society. They might even be right, under some circumstances. It was proposed that any electoral change take place when incumbents resign or are otherwise no longer running. However, were I an incumbent, I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole. Why? Well, come the next election, if I had supported this, it *would* be raised that I protected my own position at the expense of democracy. After all, if it is a good idea for the future, why not now? No, I would argue against the reform. Unless I believed in it, in which case I'd support it from the beginning. There is a better way. Focus on situations for reform where there is a majority failure, where third parties are actually spoiling elections, or would if they ran candidates. Under these conditions, a coalition of the third parties with the losing major party could have a majority and could be able to push through reform. It would be in their collective interest. This requires organizing outside the parties, that is, there must be some metastructure which could coordinate the efforts of the individual parties, which might otherwise not be on particularly good speaking terms.... CVD is a small group of people with some money. They made their strategic decision to support IRV, and they are utterly uninterested in democratic process when it comes to making strategic or tactical decisions. This is, in fact, typical of far too many democratic reform organizations. Democracy is good for public elections, they will say, but behind this is often simple self-interest. They don't like the present outcomes of public elections. If they really believed in democracy, they would apply it to their own process. But they *don't* believe in democracy, unless it produces the results they desire. They fear that democracy is a messy and inefficient process, and that it is unworkable, essentially. They only tolerate it. I think differently. I believe that the central problem of democracy is that efficient democratic structures exist, both in practice and even more in theory, but there is no general knowledge about this. We, including social scientists in general, are blinded by the status quo. The more sophisticated among us know that direct democracy works quite well in small groups, but then we assume that because it is known to break down in large groups, for well-known reasons, there is no satisfactory method of extending the benefits of direct democracy to large constituencies, so we must compromise on electoral representative democracy in spite of its severe limitations and the fact that it was long considered not to be democracy at all. "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others." This famous quotation from Winston Churchill assumes that democracy is electoral democracy, it is what Churchill knew. One living in a small town, say, under 1000 people, with Town Meeting government, would never say this. We will have serious election reform when we reform the process by which we attempt to gain it. We will have true democracy when we have true democracy in the voluntary organizations we create and participate in. It starts with us. Instead, we organize undemocratically and attempt to get others to reform. Sometimes we are successful, but somehow the reform doesn't accomplish the desired goals. It is not surprising. We are trying to scrub a dirty blanket with a piece of coal. There are solutions to the problem of scale in democracy, and we do not need to change the laws to implement them. If we implement them, legal reforms, if they are still needed, will be almost trivial. http://metaparty.beyondpolitics.org ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info