Some empirical evidence here. Australia, Malta and Ireland use preferential voting, for single-seat and multi-seat elections. In Australia, preferential voting has almost always given the largest number of first-choice votes (and government for about 26 of the 61 years since 1941) to the Australian Labor Party, which even today is nominally socialist, and in 1947-49 actually tried to nationalise the country's banks. Can you imagine either Democrats or Republicans doing either in the USA? Australian electoral systems have also given the third-highest place to the National Party (formerly Country Party), which until recent years used to believe people should be put in jail for treason if they called for Australia to remove the monarchy and become a republic. In Malta, the contest is between a conservative, Catholic-dominated Nationalist Party and a Labour Party which was friendly with North Korea and which tried to stop US warships using the country's ports. In Ireland, preferential voting has seen a Labour Party president and a swag of Sinn Fein parliamentarians. Where's the "grey centrism" in any of these countries -- especially compared to the USA, which almost universally uses simple plurality elections? I emphasise, some (even all!) of these other parties' policy stances may well be unwise or undesirable, but no one can seriously claim that the US Democrats and Republicans are ideologically further apart than the main parliamentary parties in Ireland, Malta and Australia.

At 11:38 14-11-2002 -0800, Larry Levine wrote:

Preferential balloting and instant run offs are solutions in search of a
problem. They will further dull political debate and drain the process of
ideological discourse.
Larry


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Hasen" <rick.hasen@lls.edu>
To: <election-law@majordomo.lls.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 10:05 AM
Subject: message from Bob Bernstein


> Bob Bernstein wrote:
>
> I agree with Richard Winger that the multiple elections and runoffs in
> the LA model are undesirable (they are even worse in TN).  The
> simplest--and I think best--way of handling that is via preferential
> balloting or some other kind of instant runoff.  In the CA or LA case,
> the non-partisan primary and the general election would be held
> simultaneously on Election Day.  There would be no later contest before
> a different (and often reduced) electorate.
> Bob Bernstein
> Auburn Univ. (bernsra@auburn.edu)