Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 03:27:18 PM Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
If the US had a similar system there could be candidates representing the Tea Party and the mainstream Republican party competing for a seat.
Forgot to mention earlier as background for Oz folk: The 'Tea Party' is not an actual political party. It is a wacky reactionary, relatively small, Koch Brothers-funded ideological faction that attempts to control Republican Party functions and policy. However, e.g., no US state's ballot ever has 'Tea Party' as a qualified political party -- because there is no such party. No party central committee, no partisan affiliation that candidates run under on state ballots, no party nominating convention -- because no actual political party at all. Individual Republican candidates declare themselves to be 'Tea Party' aspirants, talk about their gob-smackingly stupid convictions, and, if elected, attempt to conspire with other, similar ideologues to do or not do particular things. Primarily inside the USA Congress, this has involved near-total refusal to participate in the normal functions of Congress, and ongoing effort to sabotage both the Executive Branch (the Obama Presidency) and their own Republican leaders. (This is the biggest reason why John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives and conservative Republican from Ohio, resigned as both Speaker and Congressman in 2015, and why conservative Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin only reluctantly agreed to take his place as Speaker: The job has been made difficult and thankless by mindless obstruction from the small ~10% faction of Tea Party nitwits, who undermine and sandbag Republican Party leaders.) (Trumpism, if there is such a thing outside the celebrity ego cult, is idiocy, too, but the point is that it's a different type of idiocy.)
Not an objection to your suggestion, but just as a point of clarification for anyone who doesn't know: Please remember that political parties are _not_ part of the US political system -- and I do mean that seriously -- at either the Federal or state (or local) level. They are private political associations.
I think that's mostly the case for Australia too apart from some issues related to election finance, registration, and listings on ballot papers.
To my knowledge, this is true in all Commonwealth countries using or adapting the Westminster system. (Please pardon any areas of total ignorance I have about provisions unique to Australia. I have a general acquaintance with the UK implementation, as well as of Canada's derived system that differs mainly in its allocation of powers between Federal and provincial matters. Australia obviously implements a similar division because of a similar need, but I'm fuzzy on details, except learning about the Senate controlling government supply, which fact emerged when I read about the 1975 constitutional crisis.)
If the Australian population became too disgusted with the 2 major parties there's no reason why there couldn't be an independent candidate elected in every electorate and those MPs could then vote on who becomes PM. That situation is unlikely to such a degree that it's almost impossible but there's nothing in the constitution preventing it.
In general, the Westminster system _generally_ proves to be quite resilient and responsive. And certainly, there is far less of a Duvenger's Law problem (and particularly less in Australia specifically, on account of IRV). And last, of course, the Westminster system is easy to understand, which cannot be said of USA voting. (US voters would disagree, but solely on account of ignorance.) [US political parties govern themselves]
The fact that they have differences in the primary processes probably doesn't help the US political system. While it would be possible to debate the relative merits of the Republican and Democratic processes in that regard I think that it would be best if they both operated in the same way.
Doubtless true, but legal, political, and historical realities are such that there's no credible way to force an end to those differences, so they are part of what make electoral mechanics complex in the USA. For example, the Democratic Party has superdelegates (party regulars who will attend the national convention as delegates without being pledged to vote for a particular candidate on the first ballot), while the Republican Party does not. Also, each of the fifty states is free to conduct its primary elections entirely as it pleases, _and_ also each party within each state is free to conduct its primary-election affairs as it pleases within limits set by the state's government (which, after all, is paying for the balloting). To my annoyance, news reporting typically behaves as if those complexities don't exist, and reduce electoral results to sports metaphors. For example, if you read about yesterday's primary election in Wisconsin, you probably read that the despicable Cruz 'won' the Republican Party primary, and Sanders 'won' the Democratic Party one, and wasting a lot of verbiage talking about 'momentum' and about percentages of the vote count statewide. This is partly nonsense, as neither party's primary in Wisconsin awards delegates on a winner-take-all basis, and what matters is delegate counts. Wisconsin has eight Congressional districts. The Republican primary's voters in each district select three convention delegate pledged to whatever candidate wins a plurality in that district (for a total of 24), and 18 at-large delegates are selected pledged to whatever candidate wins a plurality of votes statewide -- for a total of 42 delegates. As it turned out, because of the despicable Cruz's narrow plurality lead over Trump in all the diverse parts of that state, all 42 delegates went to Cruz. Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party primary, 86 delegates were selected pledged to candidates (Clinton, Sanders, and O'Malley, though O'Malley has suspended his campaign) proportional to their voting percentages, subject to a 15% threshold (minimum vote to receive any delegates), with some delegates being selected according to statewide voting percentages and others selected according to voting percentages in the eight Congressional districts. (This allocation is according to one site I consulted -- which could be mistaken.) And ten 'superdelegates' are sent unpledged, for a total of 96 from the state. As it turned out, Sanders eked out over Clinton in at least most of the eight districts and statewide, and it's likely that he'll get 48 pledged delegates and Clinton 36. (Numbers are approximate, on account of preliminary nature of data.) Wisconsin imposes an 'open' primary on all parties: Voters may choose on election day to choose which party's primary they wish to participate in. It also requires all parties to permit each voter, if he/she wishes, to cast a vote for an 'uninstructed delegation', meaning selecting an unpledged delegate (generally selected by party regulars) who would then attend the convention and represent the state any way he/she wishes. Given the prevailing idiocy elsewhere in the press, FiveThirtyEight is the best place to follow this and other aspects of the 2016 election cycle.
The difference between the Labor and Liberal parties seems to be mainly based on the union involvement with Labor.
I gather that this has always been the case. The UK Labour party is a very curious beast, post-Thatcher. It's unclear what if anything it stands for, any more.
Even without that we don't have many seats won by people who aren't representing the major parties in Australia. That's mainly due to publicity and financing. But unfortunately there are Australians who don't realise that the "wasted vote" thing applies to the US only.
Well, no, that's not true. It is a problem in many corners of even the Westminster system. It's basically true in any constituency that applies first-past-the-post voting. Let's say you were a UK citizen living near Heathrow Airport (west of London). You'd get to vote for councillors of the Hillingdon Council, for the London Assembly member for Ealing Borough and Hillingdon Borough, for the mayor of Greater London, for the MP for the Hayes and Harlington constituency, and for the Greater London area's single EU Parliament representative. In most of those geographical constituencies (not sure about the Greater London area as a whole), Labour Party has an ongoing voting edge. As a LibDem voter, or Conservative, or UKIP, living near Heathrow, your votes for your party lists are inevitably 'wasted votes', in the sense that you are pretty much guaranteed to be outvoted by the Labour turnout within your geographical constituency. IRV would at least partially fix this situation, of course. And there are a _lot_ of other big problems -- serious distortions and disenfranchisements -- in the UK's Westminster mechanics. You really should see CGP Grey's explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I I'm reasonably sure similar problems occur in any Westminster system that relies on local districts implementing first past the post. Which means Oz does better. Which is why I've been an IRV proponent for eons. BTW, I recommend CGP Grey's videos generally. The man has a questing mind. https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey/videos (Despite the Yank accent, he's a Irish citizen, FWIW.) [California 'top two primary':]
I've just read that. How does it make things better? Instead of a first past the post with multiple candidates in the general election you have first 2 past the post in the primary.
It helps by forcing all state candidates to appeal during the primary election season to _all_ voters and not just narrow constituencies. Extremists of all types will have a more difficult time prevailing at the primary stage to pass along to the subsequent general election -- because they will appeal insufficiently to voters in the middle of the Bell Curve of ideological and other voting criteria.
The web page says that you might have 2 candidates from 1 party, but unless I'm missing something that doesn't seem likely to happen often except in cases where an electorate reliably gets well in excess of 66% votes for one party. But I guess it makes sense to have this in those cases. How many electorates are dominated by one party to that extent?
There are some pronounced regional biases. The biggest urban areas in California are the San Francisco Bay Area that includes Silicon Valley (heavily Democratic), Los Angeles (same), the Orange County city cluster just south of Los Angeles (heavily Republican) and San Diego (mixed). All other cities are relatively small, and many probably have party skews but have much less voting power. The very large agricultural Central Valley is heavily Republican (except in some of its cities), but its sparse population means also low voting power. The state as a whole skews strongly to the Democratic Party in most matters, with some exceptions.
Taking only a single vote for the primary seems to have the same issue as only taking a single vote for the main election in the current system regarding "wasted votes". If the primary has 4 candidates (2 from each major party) then it should work quite well in terms of allowing candidates to choose the better option from each party. But it doesn't allow people to support their favorite major party while also expressing a preference for a candidate from the other major party. [...]
If you are saying IRV would be an improvement, I've been maintaining that for about four decades. ;-> [Redistricting reform:]
This is another issue where technology could change things. For example it would be possible to have the constitution require that the total length of electoral boundaries in the state be no greater than 30% more than the optimum fit determined by computer. Without computers it's probably not possible to get something close to an optimum fit.
In time, perhaps. For now, I'm happy that California voters have grown to trust the redistricting commission, and that the latter's done a creditable and trustworthy job. It is very difficult to get voters to try something new that they don't intuitively grasp and trust. Last year's WSFS voting for the Hugo Awards had an influx of new voters, and it was frustratingly difficult to get many of them to understand how IRV works and affects voting mechanics and tactics. (Technically, this was two related voting blocs, but I'm trying to simplify this recounting.) Essentially, there was an organised effort at bloc voting, attempting to overwhelm traditional Hugo Award voters by 'brigading' particular categories such as Best Novel, Best Editor Short Form, etc. In the nominations phase, five nominees per category get selected, and the voting bloc managed to completely swamp (IIRC) five categories because other voters' choices were diverse and got pushed off by the bloc's five nominees ('slates'), because each category was filled by the five plurality leaders, those five nominated works or persons with the highest nomination count. (The bloc put individual entries into some other categories but did not overwhelm those categories' five nomination slots.) The dominated categories were many of the most important Hugo Awards: Best Novella, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Editor Short Form, and Best Editor Long Form. The final ballot, however, was IRV, with the choice of 'No Award' always being also a votable option for each category. Some bloc voters did not (it seems) understand IRV at all, and were stunned to discover that brigading cannot work without far greater voting strength than they had. Traditional Hugo Award voters had high turnout for the final ballot and utterly annihilated the bloc voting slates: In all five bloc-dominated categories, voters selected 'No Award' on the first IRV pass, and not a single bloc-endorsed nominee got an award in any of the 16 Hugo Award categories. Sitting through the awards ceremony in Spokane, as my wife Deirdre and I did, was electrifying. http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/ The bloc voters generally failed to understand any of this, and have issued an unending wail of protest against many parts of it, including claiming that 'No Award' deprived them of some sort of entitlement. Cynicism aside, it's quite possible that this is genuine failure to grasp the voting system in question rather than just sour grapes. Anyway, the larger point is: It is difficult to introduce voting innovations voters cannot easily understand and trust. Perhaps less so in California than in many places, because ideas both good and bad get cheerfully voted in here, first. We're stuck with term limits for that reason, for example. Call it California craziness, low impulse threshold, whatever you want to label it; we try things. (There are limits to what Californians can tinker with, though: Neither the 'top two' voting provision nor term limits apply to the Federal offices of US Senator, US House of Representatives, and President / Vice-President, as California jurisdiction cannot override Federal jurisdiction.)