At 10:52 PM 2/21/2007, Dave Ketchum wrote: > > 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. > >Its complications limit its value. Look above at Joe - he had to promise >to obey two masters to get nominated, and the parties had to bend a bit to >agree as to where they wanted to lead him.
There is no question that the value of Fusion Voting is limited. The question is not whether it is perfect but whether it is an improvement. It would be an improvement in Massachusetts, and it would be a loss in New York if it was eliminated, *unless* it was replaced by something better. Candidates generally promise to obey as many masters as they can identify! And they are bound to obey none. If they are elected, what they said in their campaigns or promised privately has no legal effect. (Unless it amounted to unlawful influence, which is quite another matter.) So to get elected the first time, a candidate may promise the moon. Bush promised quite a lot that he later didn't give, and may have had no intention of giving. And this is perfectly legal *and should be legal.* Essentially, don't elect someone to high office whose *record* you don't know! The remedy of the public when a candidate doesn't fulfill campaign promises is to vote for someone else next time. There is also recall, but it is rare for things like breaking campaign promises, in fact I've never heard of it happening. As to the parties having to bend a little, this is intrinsic in single-winner elections. The *public* must bend a little to select a winner, or if it doesn't bend a little, the winner can be disliked by most. So what is stated here as if it were a shortcoming of Fusion is actually intrinsic to the system, and Fusion does not make it worse. Fusion, however, allows third parties to grow. If a third party manages to grow to the place where it has significant voting power, it has two options: it can threaten to withhold its nomination from a major party candidate (which can influence the selection by the major party under some conditions), and it can safely do this when the real choice is between two major party candidates and there is no overwhelming strong reason for the party to prefer one over the other (such as a liberal Republican and a conservative Democrat facing off), or it can run its own candidate. It will do the latter reasonably under two different conditions: when there is no chance of affecting the outcome, but it wants to make a point that may be of value in the future, and when there *is* a chance of winning. Fusion gives third parties the power to make a mistake in ways that they really can't now. As they say, if you want to shoot the king, don't miss. If Fusion gives a third party ballot position and public recognition, Fusion can help third parties win local races, thus building party power. Thus the decision of "roll your own" or accept another party's nomination can be made individually with many different races, and a sensible third party would run its own candidate, most likely, only when it judges it can win, and especially if trying to win is not likely to do great harm. What all this boils down to is something I keep coming back to: political organizations need ways to make intelligent decisions. Voting methods are only the tip of the iceberg. If you must use a voting method, Range is quite likely the best, but that is a severe limitation, especially when it comes to a party primary, and especially in the situation of coming close to parity. In that condition, the judgement of how to proceed is quite complex and involves many factors other than the popularity within the party of the candidates. A third party is quite likely to prefer a candidate who can't win, by definition. Personally, unless I were an expert political consultant, I'd rather only make decisions about candidate desirability, in themselves, rather than about whether or not the candidate can reasonably win. How do we know who can reasonably win if voters, in primaries, consider who can win rather than who they would prefer to win? No, what I'd prefer is to select the people who would make the decision. This is how such things are done routinely in most organizational life (when the organization is free and not a top-down hierarchy). It is how shareholders, in theory, control corporations. If I can freely select who represents me in making the decision of what candidate to run, then I have *maximum* confidence that the result will be the best choice. And thus I'm led, inexorably, to some kind of PR in party structure, with Asset Voting or Delegable Proxy being obvious solutions. And Asset, in particular, would seem to be thoroughly practical and legally possible for use within political parties. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
