Category: Politics
Three years ago today, something significant happened — historically significant, it seems to me. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is how little it’s been written about. Will history recognize the Battle of Grant Park? First of all:…
The August 16, 2022 special election for Alaska’s one and only seat in the U.S. House was notable for several reasons, including being the first time ranked-choice voting (RCV) was used to fill the seat. Students of voting methods have…
Yesterday, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) caused a lot of heads to spin when she announced that she would not support altering the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation. One prominent columnist tweeted that she was “effectively asking the…
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on DACA is only a temporary reprieve for undocumented DREAMers; there’s little to prevent the Trump administration from trying again with a modified process. Meanwhile, the DACA program is popular with both Democrats and Republicans. In…
I recently watched Intelligence Squared’s debate on the two-party system, and I was shocked by the outcome. Before the debate, 35 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, which was “Two Cheers for Two Parties” (by the way, not…
I have recently published a book I’ve been working for more than five years. It’s entitled “Beyond Two Parties: Why America Needs a Multiparty System and How We Can Have It” and is available at Amazon and other online retailers…
Many people feel disappointed by the Rucho v. Common Cause decision, handed down last week by the Supreme Court. I don’t blame them. The Supreme Court recognized that partisan gerrymandering is, in their own words, “incompatible with democratic principles”, yet…
To take a diagrammatic look at New Zealand’s history of political parties is interesting not only from a historical perspective, but also in order to study the effect of electoral systems on party systems. In 1994, the country voted to change…
The Condorcet-IRV voting method is a combination of instant-runoff voting (IRV) and the Condorcet winner criterion. In order to explain it, we must first understand these two things. The idea of instant-runoff voting is that in an election between three…