I've been making suggestions and comments regarding the choice of voting system, and about how to vote in our current Plurality voting system. But of course none of that really matters.
The real voting power belongs to whoever counts the votes. I mentioned that the Republican consistently came in last in Occupy's 2012 presidential exit-poll. ...last with a quite small vote-percent. How does that square with the fact that, we're told that the official count always shows a near-tie between the Democrat and the Republican, and no more than 1%, if that, for anyone else? We're always told that it's a "dead-heat" between the Democrat and the Republican. I'm not making any accusations. There might be a perfectly innocent explanation. But I would suggest that it might be a good idea to try to achieve a verifiable count. Would that be too much to ask? If you want to see some funny count results, then read about the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. In particular, there was a _Harper's_ article just after the 2004 election that gave lots of details of ridiculous anomalies, such as precincts where the number of Bush votes was 4 times the number of registered Republicans, or maybe more than the number of voters registered there. In 2000 &/or 2004, there were extraordinary differences between exit polls and official count results. Improbably, in every instance, where the exit poll was "wrong", it was always wrong in such a way that the official count differed strongly in Bush's favor. Someone calculated that the probability of the observed results occurring innocently or coincidentally was a small fraction of a millionth. I was at a meeting of a progressive community organization, right after the 2004 election, and the topic was "What should we do now". The facilitator was writing suggestions on the blackboard, for various progressive political projects. One woman spoke up to say that the only relevant political fact at that moment was the phony election, and that the only worthwhile activity was to protest it. She was ignored. In some countries, people go out into the streets to protest a phony election. They deserve democracy, and maybe they'll get it. But that doesn't happen here. We get what we deserve too. Incredibly, astoundingly, people often said that we can't be sure that the count wasn't legitimate. What?? If a count is unverifiable, that, by itself, is enough to make it illegitimate and not valid. The suggestion of having to take someone's word for it that the count isn't fraudulent is ridiculous and astonishing. As long as the count is illegitimate, it's entirely irrelevant how we vote, or what the voting system is. So here's a suggested order of what to do: 1. Insist on and get a legitimate, verified count for subsequent elections. 2. Vote honestly, for what you want. Make good use of Plurality to elect someone better.I've discussed that in detail. 3. When GPUS is in office, we'll have a new and better voting system, and there will be opportunity for the public to choose whatever other voting system they want, via imitative or referendum Of course there's no reason to believe that #1 or #2 is going to happen. And without #1, nothing will happen. Michael Ossipoff . ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info