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Range Voting and the Two-Party system

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Message Ron Corvus
Range Voting Explained:

Our government, by imposing that poor form of voting upon us all, has over the years too much become a festering sore of permanently entrenched, immoral, big money funded, self-satisfied, 2-party duopoly! And how the heck is the government "securing your God-given right to liberty" by forcing you to either vote Democratic, vote Republican, or resign? What kind of "liberty" is that? Basically, the plurality system prevents you from expressing your opinions anywhere near as fully as you want to (or if you try, it is futile and self-defeating). Range voting would have let you.

Range voting would not punish you for expressing your true opinions in your vote. If you vote Constitution, right now that actually makes the country worse because it denies your vote to the most-Constitutional among the two major candidates, helping the other win! Or if you vote major party, then the Constitution party gets no votes and dies out! See what we mean when we say the plurality voting system is "diabolical"?

But with range voting, you can both support the least-evil major party and support the Constitution candidate, with exactly as much or as little support as you want for each. Either way, you are working toward what you want, and not having to be dishonest about anything – and this is not a trick and not unfair to anybody.

That is why you've got to work to enact range voting. This is God's work. It brings true freedom and democracy to us all. Not fake freedom. Not fake democracy.

Third parties: Duverger's law says: enact range voting or die

Political scientists call self-reinforcing 2-party domination in plurality-voting governments "Duverger's law" after Maurice Duverger, a French political scientist.

In any voting system in which Duverger's law holds, third parties are going to be permanent doormats, and the corporate-corrupted and moneyed top-2 parties are always going to crush everything before them. And the rest of us consequently are going to suffer from massively reduced voter choice, massive idea-deficit, and massive quality deficit in our government.

Duverger's law is an experimental fact supported by immense amounts of data from governments around the world and across time. Several political science books present convincing tables and graphs of such data. Duverger holds both in plurality systems and in the IRV voting system. So third parties who want to break out of this vicious cycle should not support IRV or plurality. They should support Range or Approval voting. But as you can see from the real world data, range voting leads to a lot more pro-third party votes, at least initially. I mean, a lot more. That is enough to get third parties off the ground. It won't be enough by itself to make them actually win, but it will level the playing field allowing them to win if they have the best candidate once they have acquired enough funds and organization.

So in summary, the question for Constitutionalists when they consider "should we support range voting?" really is "do you like survival?" If you think survival is top priority, then range voting should be your top priority. And I mean top. Survival-priority. More important than every single lesser issue.

http://www.corvusblog.com/rangevoting.htm

http://rangevoting.org


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Ron Corvus wrote the Independent Voter Platform; See, http://www.RonCorvus.com/ivp.htm http://www.RonCorvus.com
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