Party Choices Suck!
I have already mentioned that three years ago my lovely wife and I were stuck halfway across the country waiting to find out if our home was one of those submerged by the engineering failures of the levee breach, we stayed with my good friend Sean Hastings and his wife Jo, and that I am once again staying with them for a few days. What I have not mentioned is that my hosts are both examples of that rare and beautiful political animal, the wild libertarian, and that this always leads to some interesting political conversation.
Sean is the author of a book entitled, “God Wants You Dead,” which details his views on politics, religion, racial groups, and all other ideas that divide human beings into groups so that they may do battle with each other en masse. It is a humorous and interesting book with a lot of interesting ideas, and I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing, whether you buy a copy or just download it for free from some file sharing site. (Don’t worry - Sean doesn’t believe in intellectual property. The message is the important part.)
But briefly put, the main theme of the book is that people are individuals, should think for themselves, and should never identify themselves as part of any group. That to do so, is to surrender your mind to others, making you obligated to believe everything that your group believes - to accept the “party line” without critical thought. Such thinking is what so often divides people into two waring camps.
[Sean has created a T-shirt based on an illustration from his book which perfectly fits election season and illustrates this point nicely in pointing out the frustration we all often feel in participating in a two-party political system.]
But even if we agree that the current two-party system doesn’t work well, what can we do about it? Voting for a third party candidate is at best throwing away our vote, and at worse is a vote for a “spoiler candidate” tht will help give the election to the major party candidate we dislike the most. So we all find ourselves faced with the logic that voting for the lesser of two evils is a smarter choice than voting for the third party candidate we actually admire. Thus the inadequacies of the two-party system are perpetuated.
I have many friends who are either Libertarian, Green Party, or just fed up with current parties and the lobbyists controlling them, and discussing this problem with Sean yesterday, I became acquainted with an alternate voting system known as IRV - instant runoff voting - that eliminates the problem of spoiler candidates and could break our current two party system. It would probably require a constitutional amendment to get IRV implemented at a national level, but a movement to implement it in local elections first might demonstrate its advantages to people and bring about the needed collective desire for change to eventually bring it to elections at the federal level.
Here is a cute video that describes how it works:
Loki, HumidCity Founder
September 29th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Goddness Gracious aren’t you the busy one!
http://www.globalimaging.us/loki_festival/loki/index_loki.htm
September 29th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Instant runoff voting does not work. Just look at San Francisco, which has used IRV since 2004. People are getting tired of it, candidates are not endorsing each other, and politics is stagnating. It isn’t helping third parties get elected or even gain power. It IS helping the incumbents. If you consider the math, it makes sense ultimately that IRV would benefit the person who is an incumbent or has the best name recognition.
Just look at San Francisco. Has IRV improved anything at all there?
September 29th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
IRV is not a perfect condorcet voting method, but it is a near-condorcet method that is very simple for people to understand.
I have considered the math, and I find that IRV (almost without exception) produces the candidate that would win against any other opponent from the field in a 2 person election. It is not unreasonable to say that this is the best candidate the democratic process can produce.
That this candidate is likely “an incumbent or has the best name recognition” is a characteristic of the democratic process, not any sort of flaw in IRV.
As for your comments concerning San Francisco, I am very much in favor of analyzing the results of such existing real world experiments, so if you have some quantitative methodology, rather than just a gut feeling that things have gotten worse (or at least no better) in San Francisco, I would love to see your numbers.
However, even if SF is indeed no better since they adopted IRV, it is a poor test for determining how IRV might improve things on the national level. SF already had run-off elections, rather than plurality winner voting, so it may be that the only improvement there has been in reducing the cost of the election process - both in terms of expense and voter’s time.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Geee, I guess NCVoter was just spamming around the things that turn up in his Google Alerts and really has no intention of joining a conversation.
Party foul.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I share your enthusiasm for instant runoff voting. However, there is one problem. A lot of people don’t know what it is or how it works. I am trying to solve this problem with a website called http://www.TheVotingSite.com. TheVotingSite is a place where users can create and share content. Basically, users create surveys and elections. Other users vote in these surveys and are able to watch the instant runoff voting results in action. I think this is a great way to educate the Youtube and Facebook generation about instant runoff voting.
October 9th, 2008 at 7:50 am