General Politics Discussion

[kzurell]

I mean, the whole "parties don't exist" is silly...plenty of things exist that aren't written into the constitution or even the broader set of governing laws, plenty of things IN our government as well. Parties are even written on the ballot.

I don't believe "second place winner" has any merit in a political system like the Canadian federal or provincial system which has parties. People...largely...vote for (or against) parties (or party leaders) not the individuals (no matter what they tell themselves...).

In the Canadian system where we are usually in practice choosing between all of 3 options, choosing the second place option, IMO would be subverting the will of the people.

Take the hypothetical, the winning candidate who is no longer available, never existed, and the party selected a different candidate in the original election. I believe the chances are very high that the new hypothetical person would have been still have been elected, rather than a different party being elected.

Hence, the "second place winner" is necessarily less representative of the democratic will than the party selecting a new MP.

(Of course, there is no mechanism for that in our federal government, nor I believe for the second place candidate to be selected, I'm pretty sure the ONLY option is to run a byelection which we both agree, is the preferred option. So both options are equally incompatible with our constitution.)

But even in a non-party system like the region's local government, I find it dubious at best to select the second place winner, but less dubious if we had a ranked ballot where you can at least evaluate who those voters would have voted for.

If parties are meritorious, write them into the constitution. Then we'd each have a country of citizenship, a province and municipality of residence, and a party of, what, propriety? principle? peccadillo?

Until that's done, party names on the ballot are private capture of public authority. Until voters are _obliged_ to vote for parties (say, with a mixed system with party-captured seats, ugh), they're really accomplices, and the ambiguity gives cover for many sins. And that's what I tell myself...

I only prefer a byelection just to keep people voting, if we're too cheap to do it there's nothing wrong with a second choice. I realize I was somewhat conflating "second on the ranked ballot" and "second on the FPTP ballot" (if only in my own mind), but the latter is still vastly preferable to "second in the party conference": they had their shot, better luck next time. To allow parties to select a replacement, we'd first need to _remove_ the candidate names from ballots, which could be done, see above. The options are not equally incompatible.

The reason I jumped into this part of the thread is that party politics is one of the "high-fructose corn syrups" of civilization: over-refined and low value, dangerous to our health in nearly any quantity, but habit-forming. We've escaped it municipally, but treating it casually leaves us at risk. I don't have a good remedy for our dependency on it elsewhere, but I believe it's possible, and important.