Election Reform

The former bassist of Nirvana is on the road, plugging his new book on election reform, because,you know, our democracy is "broken":

In a slim book, "Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy!" Novoselic outlines two approaches that he believes would breathe new life into politics.

Instant-runoff voting allows voters to pick several candidates for the same office, ranking them in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first choices, second choices are considered.

Supporters of third-party candidates like Ralph Nader could feel like they're not throwing their votes away because their secondary choices would be considered in a close election, Novoselic said.

Interesting! Yes, let's change our whole system just so some people won't feel like they're throwing their votes away.

Well I got news for ya, you are throwing it away!

Why is that my problem?

Talk about having your cake and eating it too! What if you don't want to vote for a 3rd party candidate -- why do others get a special voting privilege?

Are elections about feeling good now?

The other main point of the book is:

The second method, known as proportional representation, would allocate legislative seats based on the percentage of votes a party receives -- if the Republicans win 60 percent of the vote in a district, they would get 6 seats out of 10 available.

These methods could give greater influence to third-party candidates, other election-reform advocates say.

I must say, at one time I was far more sympathetic to the notion of greater influence for 3rd parties.

But eventually I came to my senses.

The current 2-party "system" evolved naturally out of the winner-take-all nature of our elections, and this is beneficial, for it forces all the various interest groups to attempt to band together into the broadest coalition possible by appealing to the vast center. That is precisely why we end up with 2 major parties that are usually closely balanced.

And given that when left unchecked, government tends to become a destructive monster hungry for your money and your rights, the more it is forced to appeal to the ho-hum sentiments of apathetic bourgeoisie moderates, the better.

What, you want governing coalitions to be forced to be beholden to small groups of lunatic fringe parties with radical agendas for reshaping society according to their wild utopian visions?

Because they're the ones primarily being shut out of the non-proportional system.

I don't know, I have a suspicion our democracy only appears "broken" to sore losers who can't comprehend the world around them because they don't know a single person who isn't a Democrat, so it must all be rigged.