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electoral reading list

Rob Lanphier edited this page Oct 18, 2017 · 2 revisions

2017-10-17 - This is a crude electoral reform and electoral justice reading list, some of which I wrote and need to update:

1. Electoral Justice

The Global Fight For Electoral Justice: A Primer by Erik Moeller (2016-12-18) -- as he puts it: "A primer to prepare anyone to engage in electoral justice efforts, written from a US perspective and looking at global reform efforts."

2. No perfect system

xkcd 1844

xkcd.com/1844

This is a well-deserved potshot at those of us wonk-o-nerds who know what Arrow's Theorem is. The explainxkcd.com article for 1844 does an excellent job providing a newcomer summary to the issues.

3. My 1996 and 2002 articles

A 1996 article I wrote for The Perl Journal, where I talk about Duverger's Law

Here's an unofficial reprint an article I wrote for The Perl Journal in 1996 explaining Duverger's Law, with some dead links in it. The material (unfortunately) highlights current day problems: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_3/tpj0103-0002.html

2002 article - "Campaign Finance Reform: A Red Herring" - Kuro5hin

A more recent article I wrote in 2002 for the now defunct website Kuro5hin (in some ways the reddit of its day; Daily Kos started off using Kuro5hin's software). I got a lot of upvotes and had a really robust conversation thread https://web.archive.org/web/20030812091133/http://www.kuro5hin.org:80/story/2002/2/17/23347/8051

4. Michael Baumann in The Ringer about Kaepernick and Duverger's Law (2017)

A much more contemporary article published a couple of weeks ago by Michael Baumann about the NFL/Kaepernick fury, and how it relates to Duverger's Law - https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2017/9/26/16365282/protest-debate-colin-kaepernick-alejandro-villanueva-police-brutality

The Ringer Only One Side of the NFL Protest Debate Is Worth Listening To When Colin Kaepernick first sat down during the national anthem, he was protesting a specific kind of injustice. Everything else is just noise.

5. Electoral reform organizations - The Center for Election Science and FairVote.

Here's a link to an organization that is advocating alternatives to our awful First-Past-the-Post election system: http://electology.org/ There is also a bigger and more popular organization that is also advocating alternatives (and deserves credit for San Francisco using Instant Runoff): http://www.fairvote.org/

Copyright (c) 2017 Rob Lanphier and contributors

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