Can I throw one thing out there on coting reform, considering that FPTP w/ runoff was considered, but the flaw was the fear that we'd have two extreme candidates in the final?
Why not have a runoff with the top three candidates?
We'd have our election, and the final three would run against each other in a runoff where plurality, not majority, is required.
Just a thought, there amy turn out to be perfectly good reasons not to do this.
I have another idea that I've been mulling over, although it certainly needs to be refined since it would make elections take a very long time in very close races between many candidates.
The basic idea is that, in a race with
n candidates, anyone who gets a percent of the vote greater than 100/
n proceeds to the runoff . So, in a 3-candidate race, you'd need more than 33.3% of the vote, or in a 4-candidate race, you'd need more than 25% of the vote, etc. The reason to do this is to make it so that we still have FPTP in the end, but so that candidates with a substantial amount of support who just fall a little short of the top two (or whatever) don't get excluded. The percentage requirement is such that there must be at least one candidate eliminated in each round, unless there is an exact
n-way tie, which I realize I haven't accounted for.
Ideally, to fully achieve the desire of the people, the new runoff would also go into a runoff if still no one receives a majority of the vote, but if we take it down that path we could have an awful lot of runoffs.
I still haven't quite figured out if this idea is worth pursuing, so I thought I'd get someone else's take on it.
