Robin Garwood wrote:
> It's amazing to me that anyone thinks there's "balance" in the two party > system. I agree with Mary that the Minneapolis DFL hegemony is less than > healthy, but the two-party domination of our larger democracy is only > slightly better. We just elected a governor with less than 50% support for > the second time in four years. The recent national GOP "sweep" reflected > one or two percent margins in all of TWO senate races falling their way. > My response: I think Robin is advocating multi-party government here. To that I say "Huzzah!" There's been a lot of discussion on the Minnesota List about IRV, where you rank your votes for each candidate, instead of just voting for one candidate. There has also been a little talk about other multi-party voting systems (of which I can't remember any other names). But there's been nothing on the Minneapolis List. I bet there would be more interest in Minneapolis, where we've shown more interest in third party voting, and where we are currently stuck with one-party government. Maybe we could get a movement going in Minneapolis for more third party favorable systems. I think the best system for Minneapolis would be voting for the council as at-large positions. Then we would all have 13 votes to pick who we wanted, instead of being stuck with just one person in our geographic area. With cumulative voting, we could vote all 13 votes for one candidate. That way we could be sure to have representation for minorities of several groups in the council, if the groups were cohesive enough to compose a voting block. We could then have several Greens, racial minorities, even Republicans on every council, as long as these groups were committed enough to group all 13 votes to one or two candidates. I sure would rather be represented by someone of my own interest group, rather than someone who happens to live close to me. I feel disenfranchised by every council vote - I usually vote for the DFLer who isn't quite as bad as the other one. In our last election, the Senate race was a lot dirtier than the Governor race. I attribute that to Penny being a significant factor in the Gov race. Candidates can't afford to be dirty in a three party race, because dumping on another candidate makes both sides look bad, which mostly benefits the non-participating one. So I think the presence of three or more significant parties will make races more issue oriented with less emphasis on personality. What do we do to get such a movement started? Is "FairVote Minnesota" working on the Minneapolis angle? Mark Anderson Bancroft _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
