{"id":1672,"date":"2003-08-01T16:43:00","date_gmt":"2003-08-01T20:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=1672"},"modified":"2003-08-01T16:43:00","modified_gmt":"2003-08-01T20:43:00","slug":"200-and-counting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2003\/08\/01\/16\/43\/200-and-counting\/","title":{"rendered":"200 and Counting&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsday.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/la-me-candidates1aug01,0,7850859.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines\">number of eager entrants in the California Recall Election has topped 200<\/a>, 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 &#8220;Bob Dole&#8221; and Larry Flynt are running. The utter hollowness of American &#8220;democracy&#8221; 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&#8217;t just, fair, or even sensible and means that the vast majority of people&#8217;s votes would be effectively burned or shredded. If second and third preferences were taken into account then you&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}