On November 18, the Maine Secretary of State determined that the initiative for instant runoff voting (for all federal and state office except President) does have enough valid signatures. It will appear on the November 2016 ballot.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
Very good news!
IRV makes the threshold 50% plus one vote and that cements the biggest civic group or party in power, perpetuates the two party system and destroys potential for unity.
Even random wins caused by the split vote problem in plurality elections will no longer be possible under IRV and IRV is pluality voting as well.
The 9th USA Parliament has been using pure proportional representation (PR) for more than 20 consecutive years and it works fine.
http://www.usparliament.org
Now there is our United Coalition on the global stage too:
http://www.international-parliament.org
Good news! IRV would make the threshold for the gubernatorial election 50% plus one vote and that means a right wing crackpot like LePage would NEVER be elected governor again. Proportional representation should be implemented for electing our legislators, but for a single-seat election such as the governor’s office, IRV (or even a separate runoff election) is a huge improvement.
This is indeed good news for the practice of representative government in Maine. Empowering representation of relevant viewpoints in democratic decision-making, at the state level of decision making is certainly an advance of some sort over the current practice of partisan separation and permission to party members to vote in accordance with the views of their constituencies while protecting their seats from the party leadership. This lessens the power of the corporations over the Duopoly, if not its pathetic adherents.
Candidates attracted to single-winner district elections have no incentive in working with others because they are too busy trying to tell people how much better they are than everyone else.
Single-winner districts perpetuate the back and forth pattern of the two-party system.
Forget about all single-winner districts because those types of elections attract power-grabbing opportunists who want you to be engaged because all they need is a fight and division. They only need 50% plus one of the voters, so they don’t need anyone else, they want conflict and the bad publicity surrounding it.
They will simply dictate until the next single-winner (often the 2nd biggest civic group) defeats them and that’s how the two-party system stays entrenched.
If you want to see unity and inclusion than reject every single-winner election district and focus on pure proportional representation (PR).
James Ogle writes “Forget about all single-winner districts…”. Really? That’s a nice dream, but would require major surgery to the constitutions of the United States and each of the states. That’s not gonna happen. I live in Wyoming which is one of the twelve states with that has 1 or 2 House Reps. How does proportional representation fit into that? By merging some of the states? Hah!
Yes, proportional representation is good, maybe even better the RCV, but James – please stop wasting BAN readers’ time by continually writing about your fantasy. It just turns off folks who might become readers of Richard’s marvelous blog.