Agreed I strayed beyond "consensus statement". You gave me room to
work on some details that need considering in the overall task.
On Nov 9, 2011, at 9:24 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
DLW wrote: In light of the #OWS statement on electoral reform.
http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com/2011/11/people-before-parties-electoral-reforms.html
My Thoughts about an alternative possible "consensus" statement for
non-electoral analytical types.
1. Democracy is a never-ending experiment. It also is like a
garden that can go to seed.
We need to join the rest of the world in experimenting with better
ways to tend our democracy.
This entails changes in election rules, not just changing who is in
power.
2. The most important change is to use both single-winner and multi-
winner (or Proportional Representation) election rules.
Single-winner elections give us leadership who can be held
accountable.
Multi-winner elections give us pluralism and protection for
minority rights.
We need both of these values. A common sense way to combine them
is to use more multi-winner
elections for "more local" elections that otherwise are rarely
competitive, while continuing to use mainly single-winner elections
for "less local" elections.
[endquote]
DK: Single-winner makes sense for single-person tasks such as mayor,
sheriff, or governor. We should agree that this class of tasks
should be left to this type of electing.
Proportional representation makes sense for multi-person tasks such
as councils or senates. These tasks have often been elected via
single-winner mode - if so, change to multi-person should be done
only when/if value is seen in this by groups involved..
[/endquote]
dlw:I doubt those "elected" by single-winner to such posts will ever
see the value of switching to a multi-seat election. But I would
not classify the Senator races in the US as rarely competitive. The
US and state congressional and city council elections would be much
more natural options. And we wouldn't need to make all of them
multi-seat winners either. The statement only calls for more "more
local" elections to be decided with multi-seat elections. So in a
parliamentary system like Great Britain, one could switch from FPTP
single-seat elections to super-districts with 4 seats each, which
would be allocated by a 3-seat form of PR and a single-seat
(possible alternative to FPTP) election.
We care not whether everyone sees the value - someone successful with
FPTP could get told to see the light or lose even with FPTP.
My being in NY's 52nd Senate district made it easy to use that label -
but, use something else please, since some states do not have senates.
I do have trouble with your "more local". The House of Representatives
in DC normally includes members elected as multi-seat winners. Both
governors and village clerks are normally single-winner.
3. We need to realize that election rules are like screwdrivers.
One election rule does not work well with all elections.
As such, we need to consider alternatives to our current election
rule, First-Past-the-Post.
Most election rule alternatives like (.short list with links to
brief descriptions.), but not the "top two primary" used in (...)
or the plurality "at large" voting used in (....), would improve
things.
[endquote]
DK:Agreed FPTP is a loser from a simpler time.
Need to allow voters to vote for more-than-one, although some
voters, some of the time, will see no need for this.
[endquote]
The point here is to call for electoral pluralism, rather than to
attack FPTP. This way when our opponents defend FPTP in some way
that obfuscates the matter, we can reply that we are calling for the
use of more than one election, since FPTP is not the right election
rule for all elections. They'll have a harder time arguing against
that!
Perhaps trim this a bit, but this and the next need should be about
universal, leaving FPTP at the bottom of the heap.
DK: Need to allow voters, when voting for more-than-one, to
indicate relative preference among these. Primaries were an
invention to help with FPTP pain. Methods that satisfy the above
needs see little, or no, value in primaries with their expense.
Runoffs were another aid for FPTP pain. As with primaries,
possible value of runoffs decreases with methods that do better in
the main election.
Approval, while fixing the first above problem at little cost,
fails to help with the second.
[endquote]
dlw: You're missing the point. Yes, there's lots of things one can
do, but the key thing is to frame the need to experiment and to use
more than just FPTP. Because I would argue that it's the near
exclusive use of FPTP which is the worst thing of all, we can
compensate for its continued use in some elections...
Methods list:
Need to be understandable to, at least, most voters.
If to be usable over county and state districts, must NOT have
to retrieve local data as IRV does.
Should (must?) tolerate write-ins.
Must tolerate several candidates running in a race and report
their relative strength. This means that a weak candidate will be
visible, with this helping progress to be visible, up or down.
dlw: Yes, but we don't need to include all that in a statement for
the public. It's part of the process of experimentation, or learning
from experience and the ex post use of analysis to make clear what's
likely going on...
I was writing of goals, so perhaps more detail than your statement -
but still valuable for planning.
dlw
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