I believe in "we, the people". I believe in "from many, one". I believe in "a more perfect union". I believe in the wisdom of crowds.
I believe that those things should apply at Daily Kos, just as much as in our government. This should be a site where many voices come together, and one strength results, a strength which helps make our country and world more perfect.
I believe in the suffragettes. I believe in the progressive era. I believe in the freedom riders. I believe that if you're old enough to die for your country, you're old enough to vote. The United States started out as a place where the few voted in name of the many, and some of that many were seen to merit only 3/5 of a name. Democracy has gotten better many times in the past, and if we come together and demand it, it will again.
I believe that corporations are not people. I believe that money is not speech. I believe that there are forces that want to subvert democracy, and those forces must be fought, with the strength of unity, and the power of the people's voice.
It's probably easy for you to agree with all of the above. But there's one more thing I believe about democracy, that you weren't taught in elementary school, that hasn't been wrapped in stirring phrases for hundreds of years. So I have one more thing to say, but I'm going to have to have a bit more boring explanation to go with my rhetorical flourishes this time.
I believe that every vote counts. That may sound just as commonplace as the other statements above, but that is one promise our country is failing, badly, and it's part of why we're fighting here. If every vote really counted, the "proud idealists" and the "proud Democrats" here could see each other as allies more, and as enemies less. But in an important sense, our current voting system is built on the threat of throwing away your vote, and that is part of what is dividing this site.
I should explain.
I'm going to start my explanation with a divisive phrase. You've surely heard this phrase before. It's a phrase that people take sides over, and you probably have already decided what side you're on in that fight. I have, or had, a side in that fight too, but I'm not bringing it up to rekindle old battles. My point here is that as long as we have to fight about things like that, we all lose.
So here it is: "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." A lot of people here weren't around for that battle, but we all know what it was about. People had a choice; Nader, Gore, and Bush were among the options. If you chose Nader, that meant not supporting Gore over Bush; and if you chose Gore, that meant not supporting Nader at all. And because of many factors, including the divisions sparked by that choice, Bush ended up coming close enough to winning that a corrupt Supreme Court could put him into office, with disastrous consequences for the nation and the world.
I certainly have an opinion about what was the right choice back then, but far more importantly, I believe that it didn't have to be a choice. Why couldn't you vote for both Nader and Gore? Well, because if you tried, your vote wouldn't be counted. It said so right at the top of the ballot: "Vote for one."
There were a lot of things wrong with that election. On the ballot itself, there was a confusing butterfly design, hanging chads, pregnant chads; not to mention a partisan voter purge, interference with the recount, and a decision that the Supreme Court itself was so ashamed of that they forbad using it as precedent. Those circumstances all got attention because they were more or less unusual. But under it all, the worst problem with that election is still a factor in almost every election in the United States: those three words, "Vote for one." Plurality voting, known to the British as First Past the Post.
As long as you have just one, precious vote, you must jealously guard it. Nader and Gore, Greens and Democrats, can never be anything but enemies. Most people will choose to spend their vote where it has the greatest chance of affecting the result: on the lesser evil. Over 50 years ago, Maurice Duverger recognized the inevitable result, and formulated the law that bears his name: in a plurality system, there will tend to be only two dominant parties.
What would happen if instead of "vote for one," it were "vote for one or more"? That simple change, known as approval voting, would mean we wouldn't have to be each other's enemies all the time. A vote for X and Y would be counted, instead of being thrown out as invalid.
In the 2012 election, Occupy Wall Street did exit polling where they tested a number of voting systems, including approval voting. This was in some very blue precincts in New York City, so you can't simply extend their results to nationwide. But they did find some clear patterns. Obama still won, but third parties (particularly Greens and Libertarians) got around 10 times the support in approval than in plurality. That is, a better voting system doesn't hurt the larger parties, so much as helping the smaller ones. They'd still need better candidates, platforms, and/or campaigns if they wanted to win, but they'd be a credible threat, keeping the major parties honest.
Approval isn't the only way to reform our voting system. Many of you have probably heard of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). That system has some advantages, but unlike approval, it's not based on a promise to count all the votes. Invalid "overvotes" would still get thrown away uncounted, and that could lead to poor results, such as the "center squeeze" pathology which showed up in the IRV-based "Graduated Majority Judgment" (GMJ), you grade each candidate from A to F. The grades for each candidate are tallied from the top down — first A's, then B's, then C's, etc. — and the candidate that reaches a majority at the highest grade level (highest median grade) wins. GMJ also has a formula based on that counting process that gives each candidate a GPA-like number for easy comparison of results. This ends up working mostly like approval, but you can show stronger support for your favorite candidate, and the system helps find an approval threshold that ensures a majority. Or there's Simple Optionally-Delegated Approval (SODA), where if you approve only one candidate (and don't otherwise opt-out), your favorite candidate can effectively add approvals to your ballot, in an orderly process that favors majority compromise candidates to win but gives smaller allies reasonable leverage to make demands. Both of these systems are based on the same principle of "every vote counts"; that is, no legible ballots are considered invalid.
Obviously, I can get carried away talking about this stuff. I could easily go on, talking about the popular misapprehensions of Arrow's theorem, or about voting strategy and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, or my current behavioral research, or about the legal and activist paths I see for reform. But the point is: democracy should bring us together, not push us apart. But all too often, plurality voting gets it backwards.
In other words: I believe that a better understanding of voting systems here on Daily Kos could help heal wounds in the community, and a use of better voting systems, where evely vote counts, could give We, the People more power to form a more perfect union.