At 02:04 PM 2/14/2007, Dave Ketchum wrote: > Plurality NEEDS Primaries to avoid having multiple related >candidates competing. While other methods may also use >primaries, primaries provide less value for them.
While it's true that primaries reduce the clone problem for Plurality, that problem is more generally soluble just by cooperation between candidates with similar views. Primaries are more directly what they purport to be: a method for determining what candidate the whole machinery and resources of a political party will support. There are lots of us who think that government should get out of the primary business. I'm a bit suspicious of the hand of government meddling in the process by which political parties determine whom to support. Rather, if people don't like how a party chooses its candidates, let the people switch to a party which does better, or create one. And let parties pay for their own primaries. (If the state requires primaries, it must pay for them.) The assumption seems to be that third parties can't function well when Plurality is the method; it's true (mostly) when parties think of themselves only as means of putting up candidates. But a party can do quite well without, necessarily, running its own candidates. New York has Fusion Voting, which simply means that any party may list any candidate as *their* candidate. Thus, where multiple parties which choose a single candidate have ballot privileges (based on prior votes or signatures, I presume), the same candidate appears more than once. By voting under the banner of your favorite party, you indicate support for the party as well as the candidate. It provides an alternative to the spoiler effect. And when a party can show that it delivered votes, it can then exercise influence. What it gives today, it could take away tomorrow. Politicians tend to listen to large, organized voting blocks. In 2000, I half expected Nader to, at the last minute, withdraw and suggest that his supporters vote for Gore, but send $5 to the Green Party in his name, saying that they would have voted for him. Fat chance. But it would have advanced the Green Party cause far more than the debacle that ensued. And the money would have been better. Fusion Voting was on the ballot as an initiative this last November. For some reason, there was not extensive public debate. The ballot arguments presented by the opposition were the usual sound-bite deception I've come to expect in ballot arguments in general. Voters will be confused, we don't need this, etc. What is odd to me is that Progressives and Libertarians here did not get noisily and publicly behind it. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
