Consecutive Runoff Approval Voting: Difference between revisions

Careless thinking might lead us to see a ''winner take all syndrome'' as the cause of our inflexible two-party pseudo-democracy. BUT THAT IS TOTALLY WRONG. The real cause of the two-party pseudo-democracy is really the direct consequence of THE BLACK HAT SYNDROME! This Black Hat Syndrome (or "spoiler effect") is the outcome that results when we have a White Hat (relative to each individual voter -- say, for example, Ralph Nader), a Gray Hat (say, for example, John Kerry), and a Black Hat (say, for example, George W. Bush) in a political contest. You cannot vote for the White Hat without "sacrificing" the vote you would have otherwise used to fend off an election of the Black Hat. So you will just never get to vote for a White Hat, anand thus anything like a third party is out of the question.

I will now provide thean example of an implementation of a realistic solution (which definitely is not IRV -- unlike IRV it does not demand that all information from every ballot must be gathered into one central counting location, and it only requires simple addition -- it is intrinsically extremely simple). It requires three consecutive runoffs, but if we can ask people to fight and die in Iraq for years, we can surely ask them to vote three times. Besides, it provides a deliberative process, and an opportunity for participation, instead of a mere ritual. (I indulge in a liberal perspective, but these arguments would also hold if viewed from a conservative perspective.)