>I live in New Hampshire, as I mentioned. There is no way the elections
>to State House have been hijacked. Sadly, however, the position pays
>only $100/year.
What position?
>The point you missed is that a sane Ranked Ballot system will increase the
>number of electable parties.
You miss my point, somehow. A "ranked ballot system" by which I take you to mean preferential voting wouldn't necessarily permit an increase in *electable* minor party candidates. (Maybe the opposite, since preferential voting means a candidate for a single-member seat must attain over 50% of the two-party preferred vote. Whereas under first-past-the-post it is possible for a candidate who is the last choice of a significant majority of voters to get elected, so long as he or she is the first choice of more voters than any other candidate. That can't possibly happen with preferential voting.
Even proportional representation, where more than one seat is filled in proportion to the ranked preferences of voters, though it does lower the bar for minor party and independent candidates to be elected, doesn't necessarily mean it will happen. Tasmania's state parliament has been elected by PR for over a hundred years, but until about 20 years ago very few minor parties were ever elected. Less than in other states in fact. (Where the relatively small Country Party was able to capture single member electorates in rural areas. In Tasmania they never did any good.)
There has also to be disenchantment with the two major parties.
>At that point, no one will be able to make
>the argument as forcibly that party power brokers control things.
I just don't see how party power brokers in the US control anything at all.
>There are other ways to weaken the parties vis-a-vis the candidates, but
>voting system reform is the most rational.
Why is weakening the parties in respect to the candidates a good thing exactly? I mean, if you are a capitalist who wants candidates to be isolated individuals so that they are not accountable to anyone and don't have to have any cohesive platform, that would be good. They would be more readily susceptible to corrupt influence. But why would ordinary people want politics to be even more corrupt than it has to be? You are coming across as a bit reactionary to me.
If you have a two party system voting system reform would allow other parties to weaken it. Doesn't in itself weaken the two party system though. It certainly doesn't undermine the party system, though depending on the way a preferential system is designed it may tend to undermine the power of party number crunchers, to giving more power to voters by forcing parties to give voters a choice of candidates from each party, rather than just one candidate, take it or leave it. But in the US, where so far as I can tell the parties have no power at all, that isn't an issue.
>A second factor which I often consider is that donations to candidates
>are limited, but donation limits to parties are much higher. Huh? This,
>perhaps as much or more than the voting system which encourages a two
>party system, also helps the parties (and their powerbrokers) over the
>candidates.
Is that how political parties get power in the US, by having most election funding channelled through them? I understood the candidates themselves had personal control of funding?
Wouldn't it be much better, in terms of accountability, for parties to control funding? Do I detect a note of hostility from you towards the very notion of political parties having a role to play in electoral politics? I suspect this may be typical of Americans. Otherwise, how could the system be so drastically rigged to exclude political parties, without massive outrage?
It seems bizarre to be blaming political parties for disenchantment with democracy. Literally, flogging dead horses. Yes, its the electoral system, but not in the sense that it gives political parties too MUCH power, but in the sense that it prevents them having any power whatsoever in electoral politics. Political parties, when they are doing what they are invented to do, are the only way ordinary people can collectively exert political power. We can't afford to buy influence as individuals, we can only hope to do it by organising. In a democracy, political parties are the major way ordinary people can get involved in civilised politics. Without political parties meaningful involvement in elections, elections in the US necessarily tend to be irrelevant to government policies, merely popularity contests.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas