"Aviv Hod" wrote in
message ...
Pete, you're assuming that having a third, fourth, or more parties would
be good for politics.

Yes, that's true.

Having been born in a country that has a
notoriously fractured political structure, with 50+ parties running for
parliment and a good dozen or so well represented, I can attest to the
fact that multi-party politics serves only to benefit the fringe
fanatics by making them more important than they really are because they
are necessary for coalition building. What you end up with is an
incredibly unstable government that is always under the threat of
breaking apart.

Well, I never thought of it that way. That said, under a change like what I
proposed, a third party would still not get into office unless they had the
majority vote. It just makes it easier for the people to express their true
desire, rather than always having to choose between things like "the lesser
of two evils" and "voting one's heart".

Also, while I readily admit that the US government is not nearly in as great
a state of distraction as the Israeli government, I'll also suggest that
there are other very significant factors at work in Israel that are unlikely
to ever be an issue here. Maybe we can "handle it" even as another country
could not.

[...]
Having said that, the beauty of the current system is that it has NO
basis in law. There ARE other parties, they DO get on ballots, and
there have been plenty of precedents for third party or no party
candidates being elected into office.

Not in any election that really matters. A primary party candidate would
have to really go off the deep end to open up things for an independent, or
the office would have to be uncontested.

[...]
I find it unhelpful to complain about the "system" when what we're
really talking about is current voting patterns. Those can be changed
if the message has wide merit and appeal.

I disagree. An independent or secondary party candidate would have to spend
several orders of magnitude more money than the primary candidates just to
even have a hope of competing. Equal spending isn't going to do it, and
there's not even the finances available for equal spending. The current
system completely locks out third parties, even when they have a serious,
viable platform.

I will repeat my previous observation: when one party is funding another
party just to screw a third party, there's something wrong.

Pete