Below are the questions that editor Adrian Tawfik is inviting us to
answer. Clarifications follow the questions.
Question 1. Your name and the city and country you work in.
Richard Fobes, Portland, Oregon, United States
Question 3. Any contact info you wish to give to be published with
article for readers (for example your email or website.)
www.VoteFair.org
Question 6. Briefly explain what characteristics you think are most
important for a voting method to have?
To produce fair results, a voting method should look deeply into the
voter preferences. The current approach of voters only being allowed to
mark a single choice, and then using an overly simplistic counting
method (plurality), is a huge failure to look beneath the surface of
voter preferences. In contrast, I think a voter should be allowed to
rank all the candidates from most preferred to least preferred, and the
counting method should fully rank all the choices from most popular and
second-most popular down to least popular. If a method correctly
identifies the least-popular choice, then voters can better trust that
the method also correctly identifies who deserves to win.
Question 7. What do you think is the most important election reform
needed where you live (either locally or nationally)? Why is this reform
important?
I believe that the election reform that is most needed in the United
States is to ban the use of single-mark ballots in Congressional
elections, including primary elections. This ban would allow us, the
majority of voters, to fill Congress with problem-solving leaders
instead of special-interest puppets. This reform is more important than
reforming Presidential elections because the job of the President is to
enforce the laws that Congress writes, and because it would dramatically
weaken Congressional lobbyists (who have far more power than
Presidential advisers).
Question 8. What is your opinion on other aspects of election reform
such as reforming money's role in politics or redistricting
(particularly in the US but very interested as well concerning election
reforms internationally)?
Banning single-mark ballots in Congressional elections would eliminate
vote splitting, which is a weakness of plurality counting that the
biggest campaign contributors have learned to exploit in ways that
involve money. Using better ballots and better counting methods would
enable a problem-solving leader to more easily win a Congressional
(primary or general) election running against a money-backed incumbent,
even if the money-backed incumbent greatly outspent the reform-minded
candidate.
I believe that the solution to the redistricting problem in the United
States (and similarly in each state) is to slightly more than double the
size of Congressional districts, and then fill each district's second
seat with the candidate who is most popular among the voters who are not
well-represented by the winner of the first seat, which is what
"VoteFair representation ranking" deeply calculates. In a typical such
district, one Republican and one Democrat would win that district's two
seats, regardless of where the district boundaries are drawn.
Additionally a few "proportional" seats would be filled based on the
voters' party-preference information, with the candidate being selected
by "VoteFair partial-proportional ranking." This adjustment would
compensate for any roundoff errors that occur in filling the
district-based seats, and would ensure that the majority of each state's
Congressional representatives are from the same political party as the
state's majority of voters. To the extent that the Republican party and
the Democratic party continue to be excessively influenced by money
instead of votes, third-party candidates would win the proportional
seats, and that outcome would force the two main parties to adopt at
least some of the reforms promoted by the most popular third parties.
Richard Fobes
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
