I've posted three times here at the Daily Kos and enjoyed its' good feedback. It's helped me to see my need to slow down and stop trying too hard. I need to start from scratch on Strategic Election Reform: an important idea that many progressive and/or centrist activists could rally around in the coming years.
What is Strategic Election Reform?
A brief back story: Most US_Americans are not aware that there are many possible election rules. The variety of election rules and the debate over them is called Electoral Reform. It is a subject that has been debated extensively in Europe and in much of the rest of the world. Electoral reform is still breaking into the US. I got into it out of frustration with my perception that the cultural wars wedge issues were both being stoked by the leadership of the two major parties and poisoning the US's democracy. This made me seek out alternatives that were consistent with my commitment to American exceptional-ism.
My non-Europeanized perspective motivated me to consider which Winner-Doesn't-Take-All (or multi-seated) election rules should be used in which sorts of elections to move the US toward a Winner-Doesn't-Take-All electoral system. I did a lot of research and had dialogues with other election reform advocates in the US. I also tried to write out my ideas numerous times. This eventually led me to formulate three basic ideas of Strategic Election Reform. These ideas are meant to build up a more dynamic political center for the United States, which might prove helpful for other countries too.
The first and central idea of Strategic Election reform is that there are two basic types of elections: Winner-Take-All and Winner-Doesn't-Take-All and we need to use both types to benefit from their different strengths. In the first type of election, there is only one contested seat, as must be the case with a presidential election. In the latter case, there is more than one contested seat, as is common with parliamentary elections. Winner-take-all elections tend to result in fewer parties and more political stability. Winner-doesn't-take-all elections tend to result in more parties and more air-time for different view-points. The use of both types of election rules in different elections would make it so the US would still have two major parties, but they would be two very different parties. This is because of how neither of them would be able to get a "permanent" majority and dominate our politics and how both of them would need to heed more the viewpoints of minority groups, as represented by Third parties. The use of winner-doesn't-take-all elections would help third parties to win some seats and more influence on our major parties. This would make both of our major parties better serve the entire United States of America.
The next two premises of Strategic Election Reform(SER) are that (1) to renew our existing democracy, we only need to use Winner-Doesn't-Take-All multi-seated elections in "lesser" or more local elections, like in the state house of representatives or municipal city council elections, in ways that do not end effective two party rule, (2) one election rule does not fit all election. In other words, the specific sorts of options given to voters, like Instant Runoff Voting or Approval/Range Voting, are of secondary importance compared with the need to use both winner-take-all and winner-doesn't-take-all elections.
I'll explain these two secondary premises more later on, but that should hopefully make a little more sense and be enough to chew on. I do think that the Democratic party would benefit somewhat more from Strategic Election Reform than the current Republican party, otherwise I wouldn't be posting at the Daily Kos. This is because there'd be more voters and more issue-oriented campaigns due to the emergence of a large number of small local third parties or LT parties. LT parties would not be like the current tea-parties. They would not be funded by economic billionaires or try to take over major parties. Instead, they would specialize in contesting only local elections and otherwise vote together to raise new issues or alternative ways of looking at old issues. They would help to make our democracy work and to check the influence of $peech on both of our major parties, which is why I'm blogging about Strategic Election Reform.
dlw