Proportional Representation with a Single Transferrable Vote
PR-STV rocks the house. It's the solution to this whole electoral collage crap. It would allow for more parties than just the republicrats, and it would allow for people to vote their heart, not to cover their asses.
The basic idea of that system is that you rate the candidates in order, so you can have first, second, third, and so on choices. You'd get the list of candidates and you'd get to rank them... So I personally would say,
Gore -2
Bush -
Nader -1
(I could give Bush my third choice, but I wouldn't because I'd rather not. Although I guess I prefer Bush to Buchanan, so if Buchanan were on the list, I'd give Bush my third choice.)
(I'm making these numbers up completely).
Say Gore gets 2,200,000 votes.
Bush gets 2,300,000 votes.
Nader gets 200,000 votes.
They would say that the winning threshold is half plus one of all votes
cast. In my theoretical case, the threshhold would be 2,350,001. No one got
that threshold in the first count. So they'd toss out the lowest "scoring"
guy. In this case, Nader. And they'd distribute those 200,000 according to
those people's SECOND choice. Presumably, 99% of people who voted Nader
would have Gore as a second choice. So say they'd give 190,000 more votes to
Gore. So then Gore would end up at 2,390,000 votes -- over the threshold --
and he'd win.
Doesn't that make more sense?
Actually, with PR-STV, Nader probably would have gotten a much higher percentage because people wouldn't be afraid to vote for him.
I'm telling you guys this because the more people who know about PR-STV, the better. It's sort of a daydream of mine, that someday we'll have it here.
If you want to know more about it, here are some links, some most of which were found by a fellow Ecto named Brian.
The PR factsheet
This has lots of info about proportional representation, which is not about the "single transferable vote" as much, but still --some info on how PR was used in America in the past, to generally great results.
The PR Library, "another site devoted to PR systems".
Happy reading, my dears.