Alternative voting

[Anonymous]

Tom Friedman has a nice op-ed piece in today's Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/opinion/24friedman.html?hp), in which he argues for a change in our voting rules. He would like to see us follow Australia and use "alternative voting", where each voter ranks all candidates, and a several stage process is used in which the candidate with the smallest number of top rank votes is eliminated until only one remains. He argues that this would be good for the middle ground, since it would make it possible for a middle-of-the-road candidate to get votes from people who are now afraid that a vote for the moderate might elect the extreme they dislike most.

I personally like the idea, and it might get support from libertarians, greens, tea-partiers, LaRouchies, and other third party types as well. How does it resonate with you folks?

[jsteele]

Friedman, like many mainstream pundits, lives in a fantasy world in which everything that he believes is exactly aligned with the beliefs of "moderate" and "centrist" Americans. So, an idea is considered centrist for no other reason than the fact that Friedman himself supports that idea. I would argue that Friedman perceives the world to fit his vision, rather than allowing the world to define his perceptions. Case in point, Friedman laments an alleged inability of voters to choose moderate candidates. However, the two major candidates of the past presidential election were both moderates. Friedman correctly notes that Obama was successful in "tapping the center". McCain had made his career as being a "maverick" who was not afraid to buck his party. He had worked with Ted Kennedy on a number of issues. Both parties had candidates that appealed to their party extremes, but both parties rejected such candidates (otherwise, we would be currently led by President Kucinich or President Tancredo). In Friedman's mind, the two party system creates candidates from opposite extremes when the opposite is actually the case.

Friedman also errors on the issue of independents. He seems to equate "independent" with "centrist". However, this is frequently (maybe mostly) not the case. Independents are often folks who are more extreme than either party. A good example of the downside of political systems that are more open to multiple parties is Israel. There, no party wins enough seats to govern. As such, the leading party must make deals with every kind of wack job three-member party that it can. The current foreign minister of Israel supports expelling the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. In most places, he wouldn't be treated seriously, but in Israel he is essential to the ruling party coalition. So, that definitely isn't Friedman's radical center.

The areas that could be reformed to encourage a wider variety of candidates include campaign funding, election rules, and redistricting. It will be interesting to see how well California's new system works. But, the current gerrymandering has the most to do with electing polarized candidates. Similarly, election laws often make third-party candidacies difficult if not impossible. There is no reason to allow alternative voting if it is impossible for a third party candidate to get on the ballot. And, even when they can get on the ballot, if they don't have funding it won't matter. That's something that public funding could help with.

Friedman touches on the key to today's reality: that the Democratic party includes a range of viewpoints but the Republican party has all but wiped out it's moderate wing. However, he fails to deduce the obvious lesson: that supporting the "middle" today means supporting Democrats. There are really no radically progressive ideas being advanced by the Dems and the likes of Ben Nelson and the Congressional Blue Dogs will ensure that will remain the case (indeed, the Democrats can hardly stand up for the right to choose, let alone advance abortion rights).

Finally, I can't allow any discussion of Thomas Friedman go by without bringing up his rationalization for the Iraq War. According to the "Mustache of Moderation", our leading political pundit, we went to war to tell Arabs to "suck on this":

[Anonymous]

Well, he seems to be dabbling in electoral systems. But the fact is that all the Australian prime ministers in the last forty years have been either Labor or Liberal and only one third party prime minister out of the 14 in the postwar era. So it hardly appears to diminish the role of parties.

He is right though, that "alternative voting" (really preferential voting or runoff voting) does allow people to take a chance on third party candidates. But inevitably those candidates are more radicalized -- not more mainstream, and they get weeded out. Take for example, French Presidential elections, which operate on a runoff system like what is proposed. In the first round of the 2002 election, the winning candidate was the radical Le Pen. But of course the only reason he got that far was because of the gaming implications of a runoff election. In the runoff, he was handily knocked out and Jacques Chirac was elected by a landslide. And so really the system tends to allow you to take a chance on a candidate far to the left or right of the dominant parties. It rarely encourages candidates in the middle between them.

He also seems to believe that partisanship comes at the cost of a sensible centrist group whose views are presumably ignored. But that flies in the face of actual U.S. electoral politics, where both parties make a deliberate grab for the centrists because they tend to swing an election. So clearly partisanship is not the result of having radically different platforms. And let's face it, the two parties in America do not have radically different platforms.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Thanks for the responses. I was particularly interested in the Le Pen comment, since the possibility of gaming the system had occurred to me. It would be really interesting to see what kind of advice we'd get from Rush and Glen on how to use all the votes.

As to TF and Iraq, Jeff, don't you give him some credit for coming around and admitting that it had gone badly?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:
As to TF and Iraq, Jeff, don't you give him some credit for coming around and admitting that it had gone badly?

No, like most of the pro-War liberals, his position is that the war was executed poorly, not that it was wrong in the first place (which I believe). More importantly, he recently has been saying that since things seem to be turning out more or less okay at the moment, it was all worth it. I'm not sure it is his place to determine the value of tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
As to TF and Iraq, Jeff, don't you give him some credit for coming around and admitting that it had gone badly?

No, like most of the pro-War liberals, his position is that the war was executed poorly, not that it was wrong in the first place (which I believe). More importantly, he recently has been saying that since things seem to be turning out more or less okay at the moment, it was all worth it. I'm not sure it is his place to determine the value of tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.

Or the dead Americans.
Or the ones who no longer have legs.
Or the ones who are messed up in the head now because of the horror they've seen, and come home and do stuff like waterboard their four year old daughters because they can't read.

Sorry, off topic I know. I just wonder if people think through these horrific and inevitable costs of war before they actually wage it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Thanks for the responses. I was particularly interested in the Le Pen comment, since the possibility of gaming the system had occurred to me. It would be really interesting to see what kind of advice we'd get from Rush and Glen on how to use all the votes.

As to TF and Iraq, Jeff, don't you give him some credit for coming around and admitting that it had gone badly?

Well Rush or Glen would have to decide based on their belief in the potential of their party / interests. If their goal is for their candidate to show their true popularity, they would like a runoff system. That allows individuals to show their support without the risk of throwing the election to the liberals. If on the other hand they think they are strong enough to win a three way race, they are better off the way things are. You can call it the Jesse Ventura effect. That's how he slipped in as Governor of Minnesota.