Voted

[dr_tectonic]

I voted! I am now officially excusing myself from being informed for the rest of the week (or as long as I can manage, anyway).

I found that the toughest question for me was actually about whether the mayor of Broomfield should break tie votes for the 10-member city council. As it's set up currently, ordinances can only pass by a 6-4 vote. So the question is basically, which do you value more: the local government being able to make decisions with relative ease and speed, or the local government needing to develop strong agreement before it can make changes? I ended up going with the status quo, but it was hard.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I can't see how a strict national first-past-the-post system would necessarily reduce 2-party-ness. Every state has a statewide first-past-the-post system for governor, and very, very few have successful third parties.

The only system that brings rise to 3rd parties being possibly successful is some variation on PR, but that has the legitimacy problem in a country with a unitary executive like the US has. In parliamentary democracies, like we have here, it might make sense.

All that said, I probably would have supported a proposal like the one in Colorado.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, winner-take-all => two-partiness really applies much more to multiple-seat elections, like legislatures and such. That said, I think that the electoral college system does interact with the overall dynamics of two-party division in legislative elections to reinforce it.

And since it failed by a pretty wide margin, it's all academic anyway.