Engaging on Voting Systems Within Parties and Movements
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Edit: In the parties and movements you belong to or are willing to join, you can advocate regarding their positions on voting systems.
Originally I posted here a suggestion to join a particular movement and advocate within it. Many of the comments below are rightly calling me out on that. Our purpose here is to discuss voting systems and remain neutral about party and ideology.
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Hi @Jack-Waugh,
While I would never tell anybody what they should post on an open forum I would urge you to reconsider this post. Firstly because it seems off topic. Voting theory has remained quite nonpartisan and many theorists would like to keep specific political parties and movements out of it. It would bring division to something which would help everybody. Secondly, I think you have the sequence of events wrong. You need to end vote splitting before small parties are viable.
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@Jack-Waugh said in Advocate for Utilitarianism Within the Movement for a People's Party:
so my suggestion is that a good place to advocate for it is inside of the MPP.
If your statement is "we should convince MPP to adopt a utilitarian method" not "we should support the MMP" then I take no issue. Yes we should try to get all organizations big an small to adopt better methods. The CES is also doing this. It is not just about municipal elections but they are pushing approval in organizations too.
@Jack-Waugh said in Advocate for Utilitarianism Within the Movement for a People's Party:
Their stated intention from the start is to form a new major party.
Of course all new parties want that. My point was more that they are likely to be a small party not that they want to be one.
You are correct that more than half of the voters are not happy with the Dems or Republicans. However, the existing system gives huge strategic advantage to the top two existing parties. If you look to the peoples party in Canada (The PPC) they attempted a similar thing and got nowhere.
I do not question that they have good and noble goals within their ideology. However, their ideology is aligned with the Bernie movement. It has a stated political ideology and one which is basically left of the existing parties.
So yes lets tell them that that they are wrong about voting systems. But I think it goes outside this forum advocate for them and their ideology of democratic socialism. I do not want this to become a debate forum for economics. I love to debate economics and would be happy to debate why I think the Chicago or neo-Keynsian schools of economics are better than any centrally planned system. Just not here.
So if I was to "infiltrate" them I would want to change more than just their stance on voting. If you align with their ideological policy and want to try to push their agenda then great. If you want to try to get them on board with Cardinal systems then that is a perfect topic for this forum. However, my caution is to not advocate for the party or its policies here. I suspect it will degenerate into off topic discussions and bring division into the voting theory community. I would never tell you what to do. I just wanted to caution you.
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@Keith I agree that this forum should steer clear of advocating for anything that feels partisan, and this kind of does to me.
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@Jack-Waugh I have to agree with Rob and Keith re: concerns about this being on topic. I had assumed that the Advocacy tab would be about projects directly related to the mission of the forum. A project to generally inform peripheral political actors such as minor parties about the consequences of the election methods that they advocate might be on mission. However, to focus on a single movement seems to mix voting method advocacy with trying to promote participation in that movement. That could turn the Advocacy category into a place for general political advocacy, which I think would be harmful because it could limit the participation of users with ideological views that are divergent from the userbase on topics unrelated to the mission. The Score voting movement cannot afford to be exclusionary.
Now, I can understand being frustrated with the way that the electoral reform movement tends to discuss elections only in the abstract, with little regard to the actual consequences of any of the discussed phenomena. But I think that questions of what to do with the increased political choice associated with Score voting are best left to other political movements.
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@Jack-Waugh As I said before, I agree that advocating Score voting to social movements is on topic. Indeed, I recall at CES that Sara Wolk discussed projects by Equal Vote to help various political organizations set up Star Voting elections. I will also grant that it might be easier to influence a social movement as a member than as an outsider. However, I don't think that the Advocacy category should be used to recruit people for movements only tangentially related to electoral reform, or that have much broader scopes. Voting reform won't stay at the center of the discussion, because the broad scope of reasons to support or oppose that social movement will necessarily enter the conversation. It might technically stay on topic, but it will be off-focus.
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