This old observation (familiarity breeds contempt) is often attributed to Aesop, though there is little proof of that. But assuming the attribution is correct, it might lead us to consider Aesop to be a liberal, which is to say, someone who in principle is willing to consider and even support novel ideas.
But to my mind, familiarity seems more often to breed inattention than contempt. We often act out of habit and only rarely consider whether there is a better alternative. Mostly we fall into the fundamentally conservative trap of doggedly clinging to tradition, apt to resist any suggestion that we should change.
The conservative argument has a natural advantage in that a tradition provides experience. While some experiences were bad ones, there are likely to be some good experiences for illustrating an advantage to following tradition.
Clearly, in our politics, polarization and duopoly have led to obstruction and even disappointment with politics generally. But traditionalists will argue that, were it not for the duopoly, there would be catastrophic gridlock because neither party could ever force through their agenda over the opposition of the other party. Perhaps change will come nevertheless and someday we will be able to point to our multi-party democracy using BAV elections, in which politicians from various parties can cooperate as thinking individuals rather than as doctrinaire members of two competing parties that are perpetually at war with one-another.
Unfortunately, in promoting BAV there are currently no examples of success to draw on; the very fact of being new and different precludes the possibility of examples. The traditional approach using plurality voting is clearly flawed, but the thought of changing to an untried system (such as BAV) may seem to some as just too risky. But risk is the lifeblood of progress. What if the Wright brothers had decided not to try because the risk failure could be fatal. Would we still today have no airline travel?
There are some example elections that we might study; Latvia uses BAV for multi-winner municipal elections. But in the U.S., our needs are different. Unlike most of our elections, municipal elections in Latvia have multiple winners, and they generally have many more candidates than there can be winners. Latvia does not seem to suffer from the shortage of candidates that now plagues elections in the U.S.
But ironically, the very system, BAV, that suits elections in Latvia also offers great advantages for the U.S. with its mostly single-winner elections. In our context, BAV discourages polarization and encourages the competition of multiple parties. Still, for Latvia, BAV is still a good voting system, if only because it enables voters to express themselves so easily and accurately.
But the lack of good, real-world examples remains a problem for promoting BAV and even for understanding it. Studying examples is a useful way to improve understanding. And with understanding, confidence in the proposal can mature. Although describing a relevant, real-world BAV election is (for now) impossible, we can instead study an example that, while fictional, strives to be realistic. The election we offer below is to choose a replacement for a state's senior Senator who is retiring after 42 years in office.
This election takes place in a state that, seven years earlier, had adopted BAV for statewide elections. Even prior to that, a few cities and towns in the state had conducted BAV elections in their local elections. To date, however, no minor-party candidate has won an important election and there remains widespread skepticism that anyone other than Democratic and Republican candidates could win election. Unfortunately, as we will see, such opinions can serve as a self-fulfilling prophesy.
As part of the state's legislation to adopt BAV, the rules for ballot access were relaxed to facilitate increased competition. Aside from primary elections, the legislation restricted ballot access to a maximum of eight qualified political parties. The five parties having the most registered voters would automatically be placed on the ballots, but in addition, as many as three more parties would be selected (on a rotation basis) from among the remaining parties with registered members representing over 2.5% of the registered voters.
The state still is considered a purple one. Even though the Democratic party has had a larger share of registered voters, disappointing Democratic turnout was frequent and so there were frequent wins by Republican candidates. State politics have been changed by the voting reform, however. Due to the new ballot-access laws as much as to the adoption of BAV as the voting method, more than a third of voters have changed their party affiliation and are now registered with neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party. Unlike before, Republicans (now with 915,000 members) outnumber Democrats (now with only 900,000 registered voters). This change leads most pundits to argue that the next Senator will surely be the Republican nominee.
But there are three smaller parties that have joined the competition, though few voters think these candidates have any chance of winning. The Libertarian Party, with 535,000 members (consisting mostly of former Republicans), have a candidate on the ballot. But in comparison to Republicans, the Democratic Party has lost an even greater number of its former members. These former Democrats have mostly changed their registration to one of two new parties. The Progressive party has 560,000 members and the Socialist Party has another 90.000 members. The Green Party and a Fascist Party are represented as well, but because the membership of each of these parties is below the minimum 2.5%, they are not allowed on the ballot.
As tradition would have it, the Democratic candidate campaigned primarily on the platform of being the only alternative of electing a Republican. Similarly, the Republican candidate campaigned as being the alternative to electing a Democrat; neither of these two parties acknowledges there is any possibility for a smaller party to win elections.
The Libertarian candidate has campaigned on eliminating most regulations on business. In sharp contrast, the Progressive candidate's platform emphasizes reenacting the reforms of Roosevelt's New Deal and of Johnson's Great Society, while the Socialist candidate's platform mostly calls for the government to encourage establishment of co-ops that are worker-owned and worker-operated. Notably, the Socialist candidate stimulated considerable excitement by proposing that corporations be required to obtain a Federal Charters if they conduct business in multiple states or in international markets.
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