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I am very dissatisfied with most of the Democratic Party right now. Clearly, we need mechanisms so that the party base has more voice.
What keeps us from having a voice? Why can much of the party ignore us? There are two basic reasons, which I'd further break down as follows:
- They don't want to listen to us.
- We need to get involved in local party infrastructure so that it's us, not them, calling more shots.
- We need to use primaries, when we can do so effectively, to get rid of the most anti-progressive Democrats and put good, figting Dems into office.
- They don't have to listen to us.
- Under our broken campaign finance system, corporations must be appeased, because they can support either or both candidates. So you can either do the easy thing and chase the big corporate support (donations and interest group ads), or you can do the hard thing and go for small-dollar individual support - but it hardly helps, because now you have the interest group ads are running against you.
- We have far too few effective, can't-ignore-them tactics outside the ballot box. Organized labor's slow decline has robbed us of that essential tool, the strike (including "illegal" solidarity strikes). And for whatever reason, when people hear "protests", they think of ineffective giant-puppet shows, not the kind of popular mobilization that toppled a dictator in Egypt.
- We have little useful power at the ballot box, either. Under our spoiled election system, a vote for anyone but the top two is wasted, perhaps even counterproductive. This inevitably leads to a two-party monopoly - that's called Duverger's law, and it's what has progressives shackled to the Democratic party.
All of these factors can be changed, but it's a long, uphill battle. I want to show you how changing the last factor - reforming the electoral system - is a vitally-important, too-often-neglected part of taking back our party, our democracy, and our nation.
I think most of the people here understand the first three sub-factors. Take over the party grass roots; primary the worst blue-dogs; and fight for campaign finance reform, including the fight against Citizens United.
The fourth sub-factor -- effective non-electoral protest -- deserves a diary of its own, one I don't know enough to write.
Here, I'll focus on the fourth sub-factor, electoral reform. It is absolutely imperative that we end the two-party monopoly.
Perhaps some of you are recoiling when I say this. You remember Ralph Nader, with his absurdly wrong comments about Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and you think, "We don't need some half-baked third party to save us, we just need to take back the one we have."
What I'm saying is, we need to have the possibility of a third party, in order to take back the one we have.
Here's an analogy. Let's say you love your IPhone, and you think Android is for dweebs. And then Google announces that they've discovered that Android fundamentally violates some patent, and sales of Android phones must be discontinued. Should you be happy about that? After all, you love to hate Android. But no, of course you shouldn't be happy; without meaningful competition, Apple is free to raise its prices or stop improving its quality. The option you didn't choose, helps you.
Third parties work on the same principle. In no foreseeable future will the Greens, the Libertarians, the Tea Party, or the (still-nonexistent) Pot Party have the majority it takes to win, except perhaps as something like the mayor of an especially-favorable city. But if you could vote for a third party without throwing away your vote -- and even better, if you and your interest group could explicitly put your vote on the table and make it conditional on getting something you want -- then your party would have a much harder time ignoring you.
There are voting systems which would accomplish this. Gerrymandered plurality, the system today, is pretty much the worst system you can design, made to order to produce corruption and complacency. In my opinion, the best system, and the one most likely to be able to solve the problem in real life, is Simple Optionally-Delegated Approval, SODA. In this system, you may either vote approval-style, approving as many candidates as you want, or just delegate your vote to your favorite candidate, allowing them to decide which other candidates to approve. You can see your favorite's pre-declared rank order; this prevents undemocratic back-room deals and lets you always be able to make sure that your vote won't go to someone you despise.
Like other good voting systems (including Majority Judgement, Range Voting, Condorcet systems, and Approval systems, and to a lesser extent Instant-Runoff Voting or IRV) SODA solves the spoiler problem, letting your vote go to your true favorite but fall-back to a compromise. But it also has five advantages those other good systems don't.
- It allows voters to simply vote-for-one in a familiar manner, while still getting the full strategic benefits of the system.
- It ensures that compromise votes are not considered unless the favored candidate is non-viable. (Actually, of the other systems I mentioned, IRV also meets this criterion. But IRV, unlike SODA, does so in a way that tends prematurely eliminate centrists, leading to crazy results. See Ka-Ping Yee's diagrams for more on that.)
- It has no disadvantages when considered against Plurality. Voting system design involves some inevitable trade-offs, and other good systems make some sacrifices to get their good results. SODA is the best known system which hasn't sacrificed anything you get from Plurality.
- It gives real power to third-party leaders who get significant numbers of delegated votes. They must pre-declare which other candidate(s) they plan to consider approving; but after voting, they can decide whether or not to assign their delegated votes to that (those) candidate(s). Thus, in a real sense, SODA combines the advantages of a parliamentary system -- government with negotiated support from a coalition of parties - with those of a presidential system -- a directly-elected president with a definite term and the ability to make tough decisions without worrying about a vote of no conficence.
- With only minor adjustments, it is almost made-to-order compatible with the Electoral College. That is, it is legal at all levels with no need for constitutional change, and can be implemented EITHER a state-by-state manner OR through an interstate compact. (Yes, the EC should ideally be reformed as well, but that would take an amendment, essentially impossible for now.)
Did I catch your interest? OK, here's the depressing part. It will be a slow, hard slog to get voting reform passed. We'll have to start in our private organizations (student-body or professional-society elections are ideal); then move to cities, and states, and the presidency last of all.
So. Let's storm the gates, and take back our party from the ground up! It won't happen tomorrow, or even next year (and yes, we still need to do whatever's necessary to fight against the crazies in the meantime), but it is still a crucially important chore.
UPDATE: Sorry, the poll got munged. The third option is supposed to read:
You think the answer is "both" or "neither"? Sorry, but under plurality, only two options are allowed.
It's actually kind of funny that DKos's plurality-based polling software ate that option.