Michael Allan wrote:
What about an alternative electoral system, in parallel? If voters really want to see change - if they really want to choose the 'who' and the 'what' - a parallel system would give them an opportunity to vote with their feet. If nothing else, they might be curious to learn how the results would differ (who would be Mayor, for example) if the selection wasn't restricted to party candidates.
That's one way to do it. I think that if electoral reform is to work, the voters have to recognize that the new option (the better system) really is a better system, and also be interested in changing the system in the first place.
One way of showing that the new method works better is to work from the local level up. Another is, as you state, to have a parallel instance where voters can see that it's better. The parallel instance doesn't have to be completely identical, it could be as simple as MTV's use of Selectricity (Schulze) for its "elections", although in that example, it may be harder for voters to identify that it's the voting method that makes for better results (since the internals are hidden).
If you take the parallel system strategy to its extreme, you'd get a "parallel organization" where (as an example), a group elects a "double mayor" and support him over the real mayor, essentially building a state inside the state. I don't think that's very likely to happen, though; as hard it may be to alter the nation through voting, it's going to be even harder to make a duplicate state from nothing, and that duplicate state would still have to abide by the laws of the real state.
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