OSNews

Soulbender,

"Why doesn't the voter do more to ensure more choices?"

Good question, I guess we have to look at what causes the lack of choice in the first place.

Here in NYS, we have elections where only one name appears on the ballot. It's not that no one else is running mind you, but that the ballot requirements make it difficult for "normal people" to run.

I found a very interesting blog about it.

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/the_signature_collectors...


Ordinary people simply don't have enough wealth to pay for a campaign, including an office, staff, advertising, etc. Heck most people wouldn't even be able to cover their own personal expenses if they took a leave from their jobs go campaigning (assuming their employer even allows them to take a leave of absence).

Around here there is talk of using public money and capping private funds to balance the playing field. Politicians obviously won't pass this, but even if they did I'm not sure that it would work. Upper classes are better prepositioned for running successful campaigns.


Another separate problem is the very real artificial incentive to vote for the least objectionable majority party that is likely to win, rather than the party one wants to win. This gives Democrats and Republicans a disproportionately large majority that they don't deserve at the ballots. This reinforces the lack of choice. Ideally we'd have a voting system which enables voters to vote for their actual preferred candidates without "throwing away" their vote. I think rank voting offers a good solution to this problem, and it would be a boon for real voter choice.


http://fortcollinsrankedvoting.org/rankedvoting.html

Wait, are you sure you live in NYS and not in North Korea?



Oh I see. Now, I'm not going to say that the political system commonly found in Europe is better, because it obviously has it's own set of flaws, but at least there's a wide political playing field usually raining from the batshit-crazy left to the equally batshit-crazy right. We may not like these extremists but the fact that the do exist and is part of the political scene is, perhaps a bit contradicting, a sign of a healthy system.

In a kind of odd way I think the world was better off during the cold-war era. We might have been on the brink of nuclear destruction but at least we could always point to the "evil empire" and say "Hey, lets not be as bad as those guys, ok?".