PR doesn’t disenfranchise minorities. Our current system does. PR solves that problem.
Electing people by creating arbitrary, easily manipulated legislative districts makes no sense. I want to be represented as an individual voter, not as a resident of the 8th district. I don’t necessarily share anything special with my fellow 8th district voters, and I might even be a minority put there because someone needed to keep me out of an adjoining one, lest my vote actually count.
In a district-based, winner take all system, potentially half of all votes are “wasted” - not represented by anyone. Not in a PR system.
It appears to me that you had no idea what PR was until now, and haven’t bothered to listen much or find out how it works and how prevalent it is in the world, and have declared it “utopian” and unworkable based on your first impression. You’d be better off learning about it first.
Okay. Well, in that case, your opinion is irrelevant to this discussion about representative democracy. You are not going to be appointed the czar of which party is kooky and therefore can’t be on the ballot.
Despite what you and BrainGlutton think, many people are familiar with PR. My degree in Political Science is now over 40 years old. Familiarity does not equate with approval of it for the United States.
I am not interested in discussing it, because I have long ago considered it and dismissed it. But don’t let me stop you from discussing it. Loudly. The louder you get, the happier I am.
Oh, come on, discussing alternative voting schemes that are in wide use in other countries is just “utopian.” Such a discussion would never work. :rolleyes:
You think the GOP and Dems are weaker now than they would be in a PR system? My point is that we need to strengthen competition. One way this could work is acknowledging that the two big parties are coalitions, and letting voters explicitly vote for subfactions.
Career professionals would be civil service and foreign service, not the amateurs in legislatures. Hm, maybe we should go to a system where legislatures are more clearly seen as the clowns they often are.
What about range voting? Approval voting is equivalent to range voting with the only options being 0 or 1, so why not allow, say, ranking candidates on a scale 1-10 (and whoever’s score sums highest wins)? I believe this satisfies the Condorcet criterion, but also allows for a great deal of “civic data”, in that you can tabulate things like the mode score for a given candidate, the standard deviation on the ratings, the median score etc.
Eta: Nevermind, it’s only Condorcet compliant is everybody votes strategically, still, I think it’s a fairly good system.
I don’t know, I agree that approval voting may prove unsatisfying, but range voting 1-10 allows people to say “I’m voting you a 3 because YOU’RE A DOODY HEAD, CANDIDATE. And my pal Good Candidate gets a 10 so THERE.” I think that could prove pretty satisfying.
So, what about the chances of a trans-third-partisan alliance? Could Greens and Libertarians and Constitution-Partiers and Working-Family-Partiers and America Firsters and all the flavors of Socialists stand each other enough to work together for a shared goal?
I doubt it, and if they did, they’d end up nigh indistinguishable from the Dems/Pubs. It’s a vicious cycle, nobody votes for them because they’re crazy, and they’re allowed to be crazy because nobody votes for them. Becoming a reasonable conglomerate party would mesh their views and move them to a weird amalgam more representative of the general population… like the Dems/Pubs, and whichever they end up closer to will end up losing due to the spoiler effect.
I don’t see them banding together pushing proportional representation, it will just cause a bunch of people’s favorite parties to lose horribly and lead to “SEE!? I TOLD you third parties were a bad idea!” At the very best the third parties forming a huge coalition will destroy the Dem or Pub party and replace them.
Well, not necessarily. Take the Libertarian Party. At present it is dominated by radical libertarianism, which is something very different from (and much crazier than) moderate libertarianism – which is still something very different from the political center-of-gravity of the GOP. Under a PR system, the LP would moderate to appeal to the voters, and would grow significantly larger – and would still offer a meaningful alternative to every other party in the field.
As for the “spoiler effect,” that is something PR and IRV circumvent.
I’m talking about a one-issue coalition. That’s not the same as the third parties effective merging, which is what you seem to envision.
And certainly destroying the Democratic and Republican parties and replacing them is the whole point, but the “coalition” would not do that, each party separately would. Without the pressure of the SMD system to form “big tent” parties to have any hope of success at all, the left wing of the Dems probably would hive off to form a left-progressive or social-democratic party; and the GOP would split into moderate-bizcon and paleocon/theocon and libertarian parties.
I think you misunderstand me. My point was that an alliance of third parties would cause a spoiler effect, and rather than people saying “hey, third parties aren’t so bad, let’s try this PR thing so they have good representation” they’ll see the spoiler effect in action and say “third parties doomed my candidate, I knew they’d never work. Screw PR!”
You could try to slowly explain that PR would allow third parties, but remove the spoiler effect, but I think that by the point you have to do that the people you’re trying to convince probably aren’t listening anymore.
Well, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Especially on this particular set of issues. If we can get to the point where the American people are even talking about PR and IRV and electoral fusion, for good or for ill – which means they now have some idea what those things are – that will be a major victory by itself.