By Wayne Shepard Stuart
Published November 12th 2007 in TC Palm
The general election is merely a formality.
To deny independents and adherents of the minority party the right to vote in this critical election is to deny them the right to vote, period.
The party primary is the means by which party leaders prevent candidates who don’t toe the party line from getting elected.
The purpose is to eliminate choices. This does not serve the interests of the majority of the people because the parties represent the opposite extremes, whereas the majority tend to fall somewhere in the middle.
For this disservice, we actually allow the parties to use our election equipment for free, a gift worth tens of millions of dollars.
They are not arms of the government and don’t deserve government subsidies in any form.
A better way would be to make all offices non-partisan and use the ranked-choice ballot and instant-runoff voting to choose the winner.
You don’t know what that is? This is not surprising, as the parties control the government, and the government controls the schools, and the schools don’t teach the science of voting in social studies classes.
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.