Potential party-changing to protest war thwarted by de facto 2 party system.
Labor Rebellion | 10.03.2003 02:53
Dissident MPs should be able to leave Labor and join the Green Party as a protest without hurting the movement. This would require runoffs so a candidate had to get 50% to win an election. Thus there would be no voting for the lesser of two evils, and there would be no wasted votes.
Until we show the establishment that we will build a multi-party system no matter the cost they will not take us seriously. They will wage whatever war they want. In a multi-party system people would have choices, and they could be as anti-war as they wanted without having to worry about electing a Tory war hawk.
San Francisco recently passed a measure that calls for “instant runoff voting” ; it will be implemented this November. In this system the voter rank orders his choices, 1st, 2nd & 3rd. Each voters 1st choice is counted. The lowest vote-getting candidates are removed. Then the 2nd choice candidate of those voters whose 1st place candidates were eliminated are added to the existing tally of the finalists. This continues until one candidate gets 50+1%.
Runoffs can be conducted sequentially or in the instant form. Either way people get to vote their hopes and vision not their fears and resignation.
www.fixingelections.com
Until we show the establishment that we will build a multi-party system no matter the cost they will not take us seriously. They will wage whatever war they want. In a multi-party system people would have choices, and they could be as anti-war as they wanted without having to worry about electing a Tory war hawk.
San Francisco recently passed a measure that calls for “instant runoff voting” ; it will be implemented this November. In this system the voter rank orders his choices, 1st, 2nd & 3rd. Each voters 1st choice is counted. The lowest vote-getting candidates are removed. Then the 2nd choice candidate of those voters whose 1st place candidates were eliminated are added to the existing tally of the finalists. This continues until one candidate gets 50+1%.
Runoffs can be conducted sequentially or in the instant form. Either way people get to vote their hopes and vision not their fears and resignation.
www.fixingelections.com
Labor Rebellion
Comments
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yes
10.03.2003 04:56
Our nine Green MPs were elected with about 7% of the vote, and are helping to keep a "new" labour type govt. under control.
Likewise in Germany, of course, there is also a real democracy.
I had posited some weeks back that the one positive outcome of the illegal Iraq attack will be a serious move towards democracy in the US and UK.
It is anticipated that we will have influx of US refugees if Bush ever gets elected.
David Broatch
IRV Locks in Two-aprty system
10.03.2003 05:38
For the US, the only advantgae of IRV over their existing system is that it give voters who would have some other party as their first choice the opportunity to have some on which of the two major parties will win. To put that another way, it's saying "Yeah - we know who you WANT - now get over it and pick which of the two big boys is going to win anyway."
For a country with a proportional voting system, IRV would be completely unsatisfactory and unacceptable.
Over 80% of democracies use proportional systems. In a proportional system, a party with - say - 10% of the ovte will get 10% of the seats. This WILL produce a multi-party Parliament or legislature where IRV simply doesn't.
IRV is a poor substitute for a diverse democracy and will prevent even the rare 3-way split that occassionaly gives victory to some minor party challenger under the single-member plurality system now in use in the US.
Steve Withers
e-mail:
swithers@mmp.org.nz
Manufacture of consent
10.03.2003 11:53
Elections these days are an effective manufacture of consent, and are about as representative of our views as the corporate media is an embodiment of a free press.
The elite is unwilling to change them under any circumstance because they serve their needs so well: we are fooled into thinking it is democracy, and they can buy the result with our money.
Somehow, our forefathers allowed these elective systems to persist unquestioned for so long that they can resist reform by calling it our national tradition. Their arguments for moral authority are powerful as they are wrong. But if the Americans can't overturn what happened in Florida in 2000, then what hope have we?
We demand the power of instant recall on any of our representatives through a local petition so that they are under our control at the time of our choice, and not the control of their party.
We demand the right to vote and to have a direct say on actual policies when we choose to (this is done with propositions in California, although the tightly controlled media they have their renders it almost ineffective), rather than these votes for smiles and faces which delivers nothing but an arse on a bench in parliament who then votes on our behalf.
goat