MoveOn Primary
(I just wrote this as a long comment on Polizeros and decided it makes a decent stand-alone rant.)
I'm not very happy with the MoveOn primary; I think it is premature and much too "winner-take-all." It certainly should have incorporated preferential/instant-runoff voting. And why couldn't MoveOn just offer donation collection services for all anti-war candidates, along with good comparative information about them? And MoveOn doesn't provide much opportunity to give feedback; I tried to complain about their continued support of Kerry and others who voted for the Iraq war resolution last fall, but couldn't find any good way to do so.
Still, I think the winner will get a boost, so I'm trying to get all of my peacenik friends to vote for Kucinich. But I wish that MoveOn and other supposedly liberal-leaning groups would start modeling more democratic behaviors in their processes. The Sierra Club board election didn't offer any preferential voting, either. Even if it didn't make a big difference in the results there, it would get people familiar with the concept so they could explain why it would be a big improvement over what we have when it really counts--like the 2000 presidential election.
I think an interesting approach MoveOn could have taken would be along the lines of "Survivor." Instead of picking one of the nine (or is it ten?) candidates to support, have a series of votes to toss someone out of the campaign. Let's first vote Lieberman off the island, and work our way up from there. If the 2000 election had been done on the "Survivor" method instead of the party/primary method, I'm pretty sure that Bush would have been the first voted out. That's what I tried to do, pretending to be a Republican so I could vote for McCain in Michigan's primary. But the money and the purging of the voter rolls and the stopping of the recounts and the Supremes won out, and the world lost.
(I just wrote this as a long comment on Polizeros and decided it makes a decent stand-alone rant.)
I'm not very happy with the MoveOn primary; I think it is premature and much too "winner-take-all." It certainly should have incorporated preferential/instant-runoff voting. And why couldn't MoveOn just offer donation collection services for all anti-war candidates, along with good comparative information about them? And MoveOn doesn't provide much opportunity to give feedback; I tried to complain about their continued support of Kerry and others who voted for the Iraq war resolution last fall, but couldn't find any good way to do so.
Still, I think the winner will get a boost, so I'm trying to get all of my peacenik friends to vote for Kucinich. But I wish that MoveOn and other supposedly liberal-leaning groups would start modeling more democratic behaviors in their processes. The Sierra Club board election didn't offer any preferential voting, either. Even if it didn't make a big difference in the results there, it would get people familiar with the concept so they could explain why it would be a big improvement over what we have when it really counts--like the 2000 presidential election.
I think an interesting approach MoveOn could have taken would be along the lines of "Survivor." Instead of picking one of the nine (or is it ten?) candidates to support, have a series of votes to toss someone out of the campaign. Let's first vote Lieberman off the island, and work our way up from there. If the 2000 election had been done on the "Survivor" method instead of the party/primary method, I'm pretty sure that Bush would have been the first voted out. That's what I tried to do, pretending to be a Republican so I could vote for McCain in Michigan's primary. But the money and the purging of the voter rolls and the stopping of the recounts and the Supremes won out, and the world lost.
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