<mucho snippage> On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 3:27 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
The United States Congress, and at least the very large majority of state legislatures, are based on the "first past the post" voting system. That system while not initially obvious, invokes an effect called "Duverger's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
"In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system and that "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism".[1][2] The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle." "Duverger's law suggests a nexus or synthesis between a party system and an electoral system: a proportional representation (PR) system creates the electoral conditions necessary to foster party development while a plurality system marginalizes many smaller political parties, resulting in what is known as a two-party system."
This, Duverger's law, strongly protects the formation and maintenance of the two-party system, and the two parties which make up the majority. People who are in favor of a third-party system, for example the Libertarian party (or Green Party, or just about anything else) are deterred from voting: Generally, they are told that they are "throwing away their vote".
I have long advocated a different system: Every candidate for a Congressional Office "wins", but the weight of their influence is based on the proportion of their vote in the general election. If, for instance, the Democrat gets 50% of the vote, he gets 0.50 Congressional votes. If the Republican gets 40% of the vote in the general election, he gets 0.40 Congressional votes. If the Libertarian gets 10% of the vote, he gets 0.10 votes. The second- and third-party candidates are given relatively small offices, back in the home district (or state), and can phone/fax/email their votes in. Modern electronic communications makes all this practical. The advantage of this system is that nobody's vote can be said to have been "wasted". . And, I believe that this system would allow the Libertarian party to gradually increase in side and influence, unlike the current system limited by Duverger's Law. It would also effectively force both the D's and R's to become more libertarian.
Jim Bell
At what point, and why, do you limit the number of candidates for voting purposes? Why stop, e.g., at three? Why not 5 or 20? And do these extra "winners" get a salary? Is the salary for the district divided amongst the winners? Do any of them get assistants? Seems rather complicated. Instead, I propose a much simpler system: It's long past time to vastly increase the number of Representatives, and limit them to 1 paid assistant. If we were to apportion House members as originally conceived (something like 1 Representative per 100k eligible voters), we're certainly have a lot more representative House (as it were), with lots more members to vote for, and much smaller voting districts. More efficient? Oh heaven forbid! But certainly more representative. One could even add a number of fillips that you mentioned - move the Capitol to, say, somewhere near the geographic center of the lower 48 (or even all 50, which I think might place it on a floating platform off the West Coast - heh), or mandate that Congress assemble via videoconference, in open halls to which their constituents have access. But those are mostly icing on the cake. Kurt