Damn the two party electoral system!
At the moment Norm Coleman is ahead of Al Franken by roughly 500 votes. What this doesn’t tell us is that 437,382 people voted for Dean Barkley who was very similar to Al Franken on most issues. Being one of those evil bastards who wasted my vote in 2000 by voting for Ralph Nader rather than voting against Bush, I decided to try and make amends for that by voting against Norm Coleman this time. I really don’t know if Barkley or Franken is better, but Franken was doing better in the polls than Barkley. What really matters is that Norm Coleman is infinitely worse than either. Of all of the candidates I looked into, Norm Coleman is the only one who I appear to completely disagree with. I would guess that roughly 90% of those people who voted for Barkley are the same way and would much prefer Franklen to Coleman, but our electoral system doesn’t allow us to voice that. Are we ever going to adopt a system that expresses what the people want? A candidate ranking system is the obvious solution, but probably a pain in the ass to implement. A run-off election would work too, but there is no way Norm would approve that. He knows he’d lose. Now, let’s see if he can pull a Bush and stop the recount.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Well, he can’t stop the recount, it’s court mandated. And I’m assuming you agree with Coleman that we shouldn’t drill in ANWR, so you don’t completely disagree with him. Finally, if Florida would have counted all of the ballots the way Al Gore wanted them counted Bush still would have won: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/04/04/florida.recount.01/index.html
November 6th, 2008 at 10:40 am
actually its only the initial sets of the recount that are mandated. from there its up to the canvasing board whether or not to make it a complete recount. and the guy in charge of that said a lot of it will is up in the air until they see what if any lawsuits are filed on either side.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Okay, so I don’t completely disagree with him, just mostly. His office does actually answer about 1% of what I write to it. The other 99% of the time they ignore me. The ANWR may be that 1%.
So Bush still would have won with a recount (assuming you ignore all the claims from the poor people that weren’t allowed to vote), but would he have won with a candidate ranking voting system rather than the two party system? I think not.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:57 am
thats right…. why am I being distracted by the recount anyway? thats not really what the flaw is. though to me keirs ranking system seems like it would be certain to end in law suits. I’d favor something along the lines of a candidate needing over 50% to win otherwise it initiates a run off between the top two. wouldn’t that more accurately reflect the choice of the people?
November 6th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Having a runoff election is extremely expensive as is a recount. With a ranking system you should be able to do something like an automatic runoff election. Playing with numbers, I still couldn’t make it work out very well unless you can also vote against someone too. Imagine if you had three votes for one election office: one vote gives your favorite candidate 2 points, the second gives your second favorite candidate 1 point, and third you subtract a point from your least favorite candidate. I think that might be an improvement on the current “lesser of two evils” voting system. It certainly would be interesting to see what the results were anyway.