So in other words, the system favours the party that **gets the most votes ** over the party that didn’t even get the second most votes.
I admit that it there seems to be a certain amount of logic in this.
Well, we do not have a rule cast in concrete that you have to continue to participate in your own thread, and you have not engaged in a steady stream of such actions in the last months. (Three threads started in GD since last November, all in the last 10 days, and this is the only one that was really a post-a-blog drive-by.) Therefore, we have not taken any action against this thread despite more than one complaint. However, I strongly suggest that you not make a habit of posting drive-by blog-and-runs. This is the Debate Forum. If you are not going to actually engage in debate, then take your posts to Yahoo! or the MoveOn message board or somewhere that it will get all the respect that it will have earned.
You are not Linda Richman (and I doubt you even do a passable Milke Meyers impression), so you would be advised to not bring that schtick to the SDMB.
Now I’m all verklempt.
In fact, Tom, the reason I have not participated further is simply that I have nothing to add. I read the piece, it made sense to me. I shared it with the class, with complete faith that whomsoever desired to do so would take it upon themselves, entirely voluntarily, to either expose the flaws or bolster the reasoning, as indeed they have.
I really don’t see the error here, and after 6 years, I kinda know how the joint works.
But I’ll keep your admonition in mind.
It’s not just that it favour that party: it over-favours that party, so that a party with considerably less than 50% of the vote can get a majority.
For example, if a country has three main parties, A, B and C, with A getting 40% of the vote, and B and C each getting 30% of the vote, it’s likely that that Party A will get more than 50% of the seats. (This is very similar to whatr happened in the last British election, with A being Labour and B and C being the Tories and the Lib-Dems).
But if parties B and C can form a coalition, which would involve an agreement that is each electorate the coalition will only run one candidate, then Party A will get considerably less than 40% of the seats, and the BC Coalition will get a crushing majority.
In the US, the two main parties are both coalitionbs of different interests, and always have been. What holds those coalitions together is the knowledge that if they ever split, the electoral system will give them a crushing defeat. (And this has indeed happened from time to time, the most recent case being the 1992 election, where Ross Perot split off enough votes from George Bush senior to give Bill Clinton the Presidential election – the same principle applies in the Electoral College, where almost all the states go to the candidate with a plurality in that state.)
So the problem is not that more votes = more seats. The problem is that how many seats you get depends on how divided the other parties are, so that 40% of the popular vote can give an overwhelming victory if the other side is divided, and an overwhelming defeat if the other side is united.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
I’m a registered member of a third party; but even I’ll admit that one of the benefits of a two-party system is that it tends to force both parties to be inclusive enough to be competitive. Thus the coalition-building process happens democratically in the primaries, rather than behind closed doors among the pols.
It is true that the primaries make the US system a lot more democratic than it would be otherwise. Without them, the candidates did use to be chosen in the “smoke-filled rooms” at party conventions.
However, in the US system the coalition building also takes place in the back rooms of Congress, and of the state legislatures, putting together leslative packages that will get party support. After all, a president or a governor can’t get a program through without support from the legislature. Some of that coalition building is public, but most is private: after all, they wouldn’t want the public knowing how divoded each party is, and what issues they squabble over.
(And there’s a whole other thread there, about the differences between the separation of powers seen in the US system, and the parliamentary system used in the UK, Canada and Australia).
Plurality elections in single-member electorates do tend to build stability – but at the expense of fair representation of political minorities. They strongly encourage a two-arty system. But stability is not inevitable, and sometimes the coalitions shift, either openly (e.g., the rise of the Labour Party in early 20th century Britain, replacing the Liberals as a third party), or in the background (e.g., the shift of Souithern support from the Democrats to the Republicans over the last 40 years).
It appears, as this Washington Post (certainly no mouthpiece for the Reps) article of June 23, points out, that there was not voter fraud in Ohio:
Here’s a quote: “Walter R. Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University and member of the task force, said Ohio suffered from a “gross administrative failure” on Election Day. But he later said there was no “support whatsoever for the claim that there was a large-scale misallocation of vote from [Democratic nominee John F.] Kerry to [President] Bush in Ohio” and said it is highly unlikely Kerry would have won the state in any case.”