200 and Counting…

I read that the number of eager entrants in the California Recall Election has topped 200, and is still climbing. I tried to convince Lisa to run but she emphatically demurred. I think it would look good on a resum?. Apparently “Bob Dole” and Larry Flynt are running. The utter hollowness of American “democracy” is evident from the fact that using the antiquated plurality volting system and assuming an even distribution, the candidate with 0.55% of the vote could be elected while 99.45% of the votes cast would be wasted. Of course, using proportional representation with 200 candidates would itself lead to a hell of a lot of recounts. But in this election it seems certain that if a recall goes ahead, a candidate (probably Republican since the Democrats say they are not putting anyone forward) with a vaguely impressive share of the vote (say, 20%) would be elected (even if the next highest candidate secured 19% of the votes. This isn’t just, fair, or even sensible and means that the vast majority of people’s votes would be effectively burned or shredded. If second and third preferences were taken into account then you’d have a multi-candidate horse race and the eventual winner might better represent a consensus candidate for a reasonable majority of people. But increasingly I realise that the US political system is explicitly designed to avoid consensus politics and instead substitutes adversarial winner-takes-all selection and replacement.