If you could vote on exactly how Howard County spends $10M (just over 1% of its operating budget), would you take advantage of the opportunity? What if you could vote on how the county spends $100M? This thought was prompted by a blog post touching on “participatory budgeting,” a movement that started in Brazil and has since spread to other jurisdictions in Latin America and elsewhere. To quote from the PB home site, ...
I’m interrupting my blogging hiatus again to point you to an important report that I think everyone interested in Howard County and Maryland politics should read: Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Election Preparedness. There’s been a lot of controversy about alleged voter fraud, with calls for voter ID cards and the like. I have my thoughts on that general topic, but for this post I’ll simply note that this report deals with a related but somewhat separate issue, namely potential problems in the counting of votes and in confirming that votes are actually counted correctly. (Related because counting votes properly is a key technique in detecting certain types of fraud, separate in that the concern here is not with verifying that people are eligible to vote, but rather with problems that can occur at the point of voting and afterward.) ...
Many people recall that John Maynard Keynes characterized “practical men” as being the “slaves of some defunct economist.” Fewer people recall that Keynes accorded political philosophers equal weight in influencing the opinions of those practical men. I note this to justify why I spent several hours of my spare time reading the political philosopher John Tomasi’s new book Free Market Fairness, which according to the blurb “offers a bold new way of thinking about politics, economics, and justice—one that will challenge readers on both the left and right.” It’s also why I now feel compelled to spend a bit more time recommending it to others and outlining why I think it’s important. ...
Thus far this weekend I’ve suggested revamping the way we elect the Howard County Council as the price for extending the time council members can serve, proposed the single transferable vote system as an alternative, outlined its advantages, and explained how it would change the two main parties’ strategies. I’ll conclude this weekend by discussing how STV would affect the chances of candidates who represent a relatively small minority of voters. As we saw in the last post, if a bloc of voters exceeds the size of the STV quota (one-sixth of the voters plus one for a five-member council, or 17,001 voters in our example) then they can elect a candidate of their choosing simply by voting for that candidate as their first choice. But what if the bloc of voters is smaller than a quota, and its chosen candidate can’t attract that many first-preference votes? The alternative strategy is simple: If you can’t be the first choice of lots of voters, try to become everybody’s second choice. ...
Walking around the neighborhood after publishing my last post I had a sudden pang of anxiety: Were the things I wrote about STV elections really the case? In particular, people have always been able to take advantage of bloc voting to elect a favored candidate (or candidates); what’s so different about STV compared to a conventional at-large election? Fortunately I was able to convince myself that STV worked (or at least could work) the way I thought I did. I’m now writing my thoughts down just to make sure—and of course in the hope that others might find this informative. ...