homunq
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    homunq commented on the blog post Zero-Sum Politics: Why America Needs a System for More than Two Parties – Part 1

    2011-09-13 10:10:06View | Delete

    This is a very important issue. I’m not a FDL member, but I’ve been a lurker at the site for a long time (from about the time I got my dkos ID, which is in the low four digits).

    I’d like to address several misconceptions:

    1.oldgold@3: The senate will never be proportional, so you will probably never see someone from a smaller party there. However, with a good election reform (more on that later) smaller parties can still have an important influence on elections, even if they don’t win. And with other bodies being more diverse, regional parties would exist, so there would be more than two parties of senators.

    The electoral college is only an obstacle if you look at it that way. Using same “interstate compact” trick of the National Popular Vote movement, you could fix the electoral college to use almost any voting system you wished… except for IRV.

    2. anoctopus@17: You are right. If two-party domination is the problem, IRV is not the solution. In Australia, they’ve used IRV for over a century. How many third-party winners in their congressional house that uses IRV? In the last 600 votes, there’s been 1 third party winner.

    There are absolutely better voting systems out there that would fix the problem, starting with Approval Voting. (Or Condorcet, or Majority Judgment, or Range Voting, or my favorite, SODA Voting: http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/SODA)

    Unfortunately, Rob Richie has picked his solution – IRV – and he’s totally hostile to talking about better options. (I’m not kidding about the hostility; he’s even set up a false-flag attack site at rangevoting.com) I think that this webinar is a good idea and that it’s worthwhile to learn about the problems. For those who can attend, I recommend mentioning other systems, but trying not to derail the discussion, because it’s just sad when people like Richie start to focus on tearing down other options instead of being the forward-looking reformers they could be.