is the lesson of the last two years according to Dallasdoc.
The only way for citizens to find their power in our present corrupt governing system is to band together outside the corrupt party apparatus and demand change from without. When even Al Franken goes along to get along, there seems no other choice.
I agree we should not base our hopes on the election of the "right" politician. This is why I put my hopes in Strategic Election Reform(SER) which includes an advocacy for the use of 3-seated elections for local noncompetitive elections. 3-seated elections would make these elections be competitive for the third seat, while making it impossible for either major party to dominate a state or city's politics. It also would give local third parties a chance to win some seats and potentially more influence.
Thru these three effects, SER would help to renew all of our democracy.
Ps, a 3-seated election has 3 contested seats. The three seats are distributed among the candidates and parties based on the total votes they received.
In electoral reform, i.e. the debate over which sorts of election rules we should use, there are many election rules (Instant Runoff Voting, Approval Voting, a variety of sorts of proportional representation). SER is based on a simple premise that the basic two types of election rules are: winner-take-all(single-seated) and winner-doesn't-take-all(multi-seated) and that both types must be used for a democracy to be healthy. This is because the two basic types have different strengths: winner-take-all elections tend to foster stability and strong leadership(as opposed to shifting party coalitions), winner-doesn't-take-all elections tend to foster pluralism. Ultimately, you need both hierarchy and equality, continuity and change in any sort of leadership or decision-making body. A second premise is that the specific sorts of options given voters (rankings or approval votings) are of secondary importance, especially for winner-doesn't-take-all elections. Both of these premises can be surmised from comparative studies of election rules by scholars like Dr Arend Lijphart at Princeton and others.
Because the sorts of options do not matter much, SER prefers to push the use of the 3-seated Hare Largest Remainder election. For it works in almost the same way as the First-Past-the-Post election that we currently use. It has one candidate per party and one vote per voter and typically the top three vote-getters will win one seat each (follow the SER link above for more info). These similarities make it easier to change the election rules. There is no need for extensive voter-education or any change in voting machinery.
It is biased some in favor of smaller parties. Ie, it doesn't try to award a party the same percent of seats as its percent of the vote (actually, it does the best job it can given the fact that there are only 3 contested seats!) but it's bias is acceptable when we consider that we'll still be using winner-take-all elections that are inevitably biased in favor of bigger parties. These different election rules have different biases and when they are used together, their biases will tend to cancel out.
The predicted change in the US's political system is that we'd still have two major parties, but they'd both be "better" parties and more willing to work out reasonable compromise solutions to the many problems that face our country. In addition to our two major parties, the use of 3-seated elections for local elections would encourage the rise of local third (LT) parties that would not try to rival the two major parties or save us all by taking over a major party. Instead, they would specialize in contesting local winnable elections and otherwise vote strategically together to help move the political center.
And that seems like something that a good number of Kogs ought to be able to rally around. It's essentially a way to acheive the goals set out by Barack Obama in the first chapter of his "The Audacity of Hope". And we can try to get our president behind the idea, since he apparently introduced legislation to bring back the use of 3-seated state representative elections in Illinois in 2001, while a state senator. So we'd get some big fish to help to make the idea become feasible and the rest would depend on voters antipathy towards both major parties and the way such a reform could be pursued in multiple states and only have to succeed in at least one state. We should be able to do that within the next six years and if Obama helps then we could return the favor by helping to reelect him in 2012.
So what do you say?
dlw