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Current Events » in reply to Late to my own party; and some thoughts on the phenomenon of gerrymandering

Oops, I fell down (& other excuses for not voting)
Joe_Nietzsche — (archived)

There are a few alternative electoral system styles.

The French use a system called a "Run off" for their presidential elections, the Australians use what they call an "Alternative vote" as just two examples of possibilities besides the First Past the Post system we in Canada and the US employ.

The problem with our electoral system is that it is often not very representative, and frequently generates protest votes which do not speak to the core values of democracy.

For example,… let’s pretend that GWB actually won the election, and got 51% of the votes. The problem here is 49% of those that voted are not represented. Those votes (for the sake of this conversation) were divided up between Gore and Nader. In the French Run off system, the election would have been run two rounds. In the first round the one with the fewest votes would be discarded from the ballot. This has the effect of allowing all voters to vote their conscience, and not being forced to vote their tactical bias. Once the vote comes down to the next round, the tactics may come into play, but a much greater level of representation has been made possible.

In terms of electing members to the legislature, I believe in Germany (among others) the vote is cast not in terms of who will win, but in terms of percentages. It is a bit more complex than that alone, but it is time consuming to explain. There are a couple variances of this, Open and Closed List are the names I think.

At any rate, if the goal of representative democracy is to represent the people, then the system we both use is failing miserably. It seems probable that it generates a great deal of disappointment amongst the electorate, and subsequently, perhaps the lack of desire to participate that is now so pervasive.

While this may be just fine with the likes of Samuel Huntington, I think anyone that honestly believes in democracy ought to care.

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