Hunting The Muse

Voting Reform

Well, it looks like I am starting to enter back into my "voting methods" phase. With election season starting, I of course trace back my own various discomforts to where I feel like the roots are, and my discomfort with voting is that voters are often asked to compromise themselves to protect their preferences. This makes no emotional sense to me, and leads to vote outcomes being determined by the idiosyncracies of a voting system rather than the actual will of the voters.

If you search on my blog, you will find a long thread of entries having to do with various voting methods. I ended up with the conclusion that in our current form of democracy, it's essential that in multi-candidate races we have the ability to communicate preferences or multiple options. There are various voting methods that allow this.

So, last night I wrote my state representative about it. I had found out that there's an Oregon state law that disallows alternative voting systems and had questions about how to overturn it. He wrote me back today and said that he would like to get together between sessions to talk further about it, and that he could potentially help me get the ideas presented to the state House.

So now I feel like I really have to learn a lot about local and state government to know what to actually ask for! It might be enough to ask the state to merely remove the restriction, but on the other hand that might not do any good if it's a requirement on the state level that everyone follow the same voting method. I'm not sure where to look yet... it's probably a question for the Secretary Of State's office.

Posted by Curt at April 1, 2003 08:15 PM