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A Legal Name Change Puts 'None of the Above' On Canadian Ballot (foxnews.com)
PolygamousRanchKid writes: The ballot to fill a legislative seat in Canada next month includes none of the above—and it's a real person. Sheldon Bergson, 46, had his name legally changed to Above Znoneofthe and is now a candidate for the Ontario legislature, the CBC reports. The election is Feb. 11. The ballot lists candidates in alphabetical order by surname so his name will be the 10th of the 10 candidates as Znoneofthe Above, according to CBC. One of his opponents is running on the line of the None of The Above Party. Maybe the American folks can learn from their cousins up north? Shouldn't every election have a line for "None of the above"? I can't wait until Little Bobby Tables hits 35.
What's more, if it won, the election should be rerun with none of the previous candidates allowed on the new ballot.
"None of the above" is nice but doesn't really fix the problem of strategic voting. If we're going to change the ballot, I'd rather get rid of plurality voting altogether. Change it to a ranked, approval, or any of the numerous systems which are better than plurality.
My favorite site for explaining the problems and some of the potential solutions:
http://www.cgpgrey.com/politic...
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Change it to a ranked, approval, or any of the numerous systems which are better than plurality.
Plenty of countries use, or have used, these alternatives to plurality voting. There is little evidence that they lead to better government. In fact, there is little evidence that better reflection of the will of the people leads to better government. If you want to really reform the system, we should get rid of voting based on geography. Of all the issues I care about, almost none of them are specifically tied to the state I live in. Rather than a senator representing the people of California, it would be better to have one senator representing all the nerds, another representing all the construction workers, and yet another representing all the medicare recipients, etc. Each voter can then pick whomever best represents their views and interests, regardless of where they live.
Too late. That and variations on it have been tried in several countries -- so far with little success as far as changing outcomes is concerned.
From what I remember (and it may be urban legend as it has been a long while since I heard of it) some guy once registered a whole bunch of phone companies with names like "anyone", "the first one" etc. So that when people were wanting to be connected by the operator (this was way back when) and the operator asked them which long distance service to use the callers not caring who they were routed through replied with things like "anyone" etc so that their response matched one of these companies. The operator then duly connected them via the explicitly named company. The kicker was that it the back end he leased his service from the main players but charged a huge premium above what a regular long service would charge.
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If you want to really reform the system, we should get rid of voting based on geography. Of all the issues I care about, almost none of them are specifically tied to the state I live in. Rather than a senator representing the people of California, it would be better to have one senator representing all the nerds, another representing all the construction workers, and yet another representing all the medicare recipients, etc. Each voter can then pick whomever best represents their views and interests, regardless of where they live.
I agree that representation based on geography is very flawed, but I'm not sure that form of interest-based representation is much better. There's no easy answers to how to get this, but what's actually needed is a system that encourages politicians to legislate and act based on the balanced interests of all the people, rather than the current system of pandering to whoever's politically convenient at the time at the cost of people who actually need the help more.