[geeks] California Proposition 14

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sat, Jun 05, 2010 at 07:12:15PM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

>Indeed.  It's an effective way for people who hold minority 
>viewpoints (which usually includes me) to make their voices heard.

By whom? It ends up with as Alexander Haig so perfectly put it "F*ck the Jews,
they did not vote for us".

It's very obvious that currently if you made a deal with the majority
candidate you got what you wanted (look at the results of the Chrysler buyout),
and if you did not, you were ignored or got the short end of the stick.

What it is IMHO usually taken as not only did you not vote for the people who
got elected, you actually voted for someone who got nowhere, so your voice
as it were is, of no consequence.

What I find amazing is that I'm defending the f*cked up election system
we have here, which is similar to the British system where you vote for
a party, and they fill the seats in Parliment they get. 

Here it's from a prepublished list, the UK you vote for an MP directly.

The UK Prime Minister comes from the party with the most votes. We dropped
that and have direct election of the Prime Minister. We were also supposed
to have direct elections of MK's (Members of Parliment in Heblish) but that
never went through.

It used to be that you could get one member of our parliment elected, but now
you have to have at least two seats to get any. This was to prevent parties
such as "deport all the arabs" and the Green (leaf) party from getting a voice.
It also stifled the Casino party (open casinos and use the revenue to cut 
taxes), so it is not all good.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
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i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.