09-16-2022, 08:00 AM
(09-15-2022, 11:47 AM)tomh009 Wrote:(09-15-2022, 02:47 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: I'm certainly not going to advocate for a Chinese style authoritarian government here...
But there are more than two choices...and our government is far from an example of things working well---even from a democracy standpoint.
It's up to us to vote in people who will do the right thing. Our political system definitely enables us to do it. This is not a problem with our system of government (as much as I would prefer PR) but voters with opposing views -- and those who don't bother to vote -- may sometimes cause the resulting government to take actions contrary to what we would like.
I would argue that it is in part a problem with the system of government. The voting system we use can be amazingly bad at translating the popular will into a set of representatives. PR is one fix, but changing just the balloting system to ranked choice would at least avoid the problem of a less-preferred candidate for an office becoming the one elected. Even if we did switch to PR, we would still have FPTP elections for municipal government and other bodies, so these ideas should not be seen in the broader context as being in opposition to each other.
I also think it should be harder to get on the ballot. That may seem paradoxical, but we have way too many unserious candidates. By unserious, I don’t mean people like the current leader of the Conservative party; I mean people whose chance of being elected is, in round figures, zero. My proposal would be to require no money, but a sufficient number of signatures that only someone with at least some organization and existing supporters would ever be able to get on the ballot. My hope is that debates and media coverage would then include all registered candidates rather than focussing on the ones that are widely considered electable.