Strategic Election Reform, A Synopsis

Over at Daily Kos, I wrote a synopsis of Strategic Election Reform. It's gotten 50-50 reviews, but given the lack of familiarity of most US_Americans with electoral reform (and the lower ratings for earlier posts), I think it shows that it's a decent writeup of the idea. Here's a revised version of it.

Strategic Election Reform is a position in the electoral reform debate. Electoral reform is a debate about what sort of election rules we ought to use. Strategic Election Reform(SER) holds that there are two fundamental types of elections: winner-take-all (single-seated) and winner-doesn't-take-all (multi-seated) and that we need both to sustain a healthy democracy. An implication of SER is that it is because we only use winner-take-all elections in the US that our democracy has been so unhealthy in recent years. It makes our politics tilt to effective single-party rule at the state and national levels. If we used winner-doesn't-take-all 3-seated elections* for state representative elections then more elections would become competitive and neither major party could dominate our national politics. If neither major party could get a "permanent majority", it would make their rivalry no longer "cut-throat" and help to transform them both into better parties. The cumulative effects of the transformations caused by Strategic Election Reform would be to make our democracy more inclusive and dynamic.