User:Homunq/SODA voting sales pitch from 2013

One of SODA's advantages is that, more than almost any other system, it is compatible with either a two-party or a multiparty system.

While many are convinced that, in the long run, a multiparty system is healthier, it is still important for a voting system to compatible with two parties. Current politicians, winners under a two-party system, are in many cases the gatekeepers of reform. Yes, that's largely a case of the fox guarding the henhouse, but it's also a fact of life.

Here are the pitches one could make. Both of those pitches are feeding on the sicknesses inherent in a two-party duopoly. But that doesn't mean that SODA would feed those sicknesses or make them worse; it's just using them to make an argument that is still ethically justified. Remember, SODA is fully compatible with a multiparty world; in fact, as explained above, it is in an important sense more Condorcet compliant than a Condorcet system.

For a politician (Democrat or Republican)

So, why is SODA compatible with two parties? Here's the kind of pitch you could make to a Republican or Democratic politician. This pitch is a "hard sell" aimed at the toughest audience: a dyed-in-the-wool partisan. As such, it includes some disingenuous trash talk about other good systems and about third parties or independents. If you were dealing with a more-reasonable person who could put the interests of democracy above their partisan interests, you would not pitch it this way.

"SODA encourages most voters to vote for a single candidate, just as they do today. So an average joe, who wants to put as little thought as possible into his ballot, will still be voting for one of the major parties. With the large majority of ballots in the same two-party split as today, the minor parties will have essentially no choice but to delegate their vote to one of the majors, or relegate themselves to irrelevance. So all this will do is make it so that the Libertarians (for a Rebublican)/Greens (for a Democrat) are your allies, not spoilers.

"Any other system is more of a danger to you. You ever heard of a Condorcet Winner? No? Well, most systems try to elect a Condorcet Winner, and lemme tell you something: H. Ross Perot, that's what a Condorcet winner is. Somebody who comes up in the center, in between the two parties, and it doesn't matter how incompetent or unexperienced he is, because the Democratic voters prefer him to a Republican, and the Republican voters prefer him to a Democrat, so it doesn't matter, he could be two wheels short of a tricycle, there's still no way to beat him. Well, look at how SODA handles that. The Democrat and the Republican, they don't plan to delegate their votes, so they don't announce a preference order. And then it's pointless for the centrist, the Perot, to ask them to delegate their votes to him - they can't. So if the Perot guy wants to be in the game and delegate to someone - whoever he pre-announced before the election, if anybody - he can do that; if he wants to be just a protest candidate, he doesn't announce a delegation order up front, so he either wins or loses on his own. In the first case, he's just a minor candidate, like a Green or a Libertarian, and you don't have to worry about him any more than about them. In the second case, he's irrelevant, at worst a spoiler, just as under plurality. So either way, you're at least as well-off as you are today."

For a third-party voter

OK, maybe that was a little overboard. So here's a pitch for a third-party supporter, to balance it out.

"What do you want, in the end? People like you are in a minority, and I'm sure you realize that you won't take over the world overnight. So you want a fair hearing, you want a seat at the table. Most voting systems are just selling you pie in the sky, unrealistic dreams. One day, they say, you're going to convince a majority to join your team, and on that glorious day your team's gonna be in charge. How well has that worked for Republican and Democratic voters? How much important change do you see when the pendulum swings back and forth between those two parties? Not enough. The truth is, if you ever do grow enough to sway a majority, your big ideas are going to be watered down - and, what's worse, you're going to have to be pretending that the watered-down version is the real thing.

"But there's another option. You can keep having big ideas, and just have a system that doesn't shut you out of the room. There are a lot, a lot of people who aren't fully satisfied with 'their' party, who are looking for another option. Take off their two-party shackles, let them safely vote for someone else, and they'll jump at the chance. And there your party will be, with serious candidates, real campaigns, and 10, 15, 25% of the vote. No, that won't be enough to win, but it will darn well be enough to get some respect, to get your ideas a fair hearing, get some of them tried, which is what you need in order to grow. And if the major party supposedly on 'your' side doesn't listen, you will have the power to take those votes and go home. You know and I know that major party politicians, they call themselves leaders, but what they really are is cowards. When you're sitting on a double-digit-percentage pile of votes, they will listen to you, trust me."