siriuskase's Journal: Recent post to www.the-leaky-cauldron.org

TLC which is normally a Harry Potter news site recently had a "get out and register for the vote" thread. Since it is hard to find posts there after the fact, I've reposted my most recent post to that thread here.

This is it, the last day to register if you haven't yet. This has been a very big year for new registrations. Most of the new registrants are in neighborhoods populated by minorities and low-income people. My impression is that there is quite a bit of interest among the teenagers even, someone thought it was worthwhile to set up a registration table in our High School lunchroom.

According to the polls, Bush and Kerry are in a dead heat. But pollsters only poll people who have voted before. Quite a few middle aged and elderly people apparently have never voted before, lot of disenfransised people in this country, so if all these newlly registered people make it to the official polls, the unofficial polls may be way off.

IMO, the most glaringly wrong feature of the US voting system is the tendency to polarize the electorate. This is because we use a very simple, primitive, first-past-the-post coupled with the Electoral college system. This was state of the art 230 years ago, but it is obsolete now. To understand why we are stuck with the lessor of two evils system, please study up on Duverger's law. Here's the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

The movement to reform the basic procedure of our election law probably won't be successful any time soon. but when it happens, we will finally have a system where third parties matter and most people won't see the election as a choice between 2 dudes that aren't in reality very different from each other.

I've been participating in various political threads on slashdot.org, ya know "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". Here's one recent thread: http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/2139227&tid=226. I apologise in advance if the editors think this post is out of place. My intent is to take people to another website if they want to continue the political stuff. IMO, it is no more OT and inappropriate than Melissa's original posting (which I don't mind at all).

that mostly summarizes a lot of my postings here, there, and everywhere lately. I'm mostly interested in long term reform of the voting system, but various fuckups lately, including the Fla debacle in 2000 and the Max Cleland thing here in Georgia are highlighting the need to get everyone thinking about the political system, not just the in group that always votes and usually benefits from keeping the system as it is.