Support Preferential Voting!

If you're a Unity08 delegate, I urge you to add your support to the request for Preferential Voting in both Nominations and the Virtual Convention. This is our best chance to reverse the centuries-old discrimination against moderate candidates imposed by winner-take-all voting (as practiced today). We need your vote now, to avoid wasting it later.

Unity08 Rules!

It is great to see Unity08 has finally posted their draft rules, and opened them up for public comment. Key items of note:

Unity08 encourages the “drafting” of candidates

Prospective Candidates may qualify as Candidates for the Unity08 Presidential Nomination by having, in each of ten different states, 2,500 registered voters in each of those states (a total of 25,000 registered voters) electronically sign up on the Unity08 website to support the Prospective Candidate AND by having, in each of five different states, 500 registered voters in each of those states (a total of 2,500 registered voters) sign a “hard copy” petition to support the Prospective Candidate.

All pretty reasonable. However, I was very disappointed by:

Each Delegate will have one vote to cast electronically for the Candidate of his or her choice.

Why? With potentially dozens of Potential Candidates, the gamesmanship for voting (do I vote for my favorite, or my second-favorite if they've got a better chance?) is going to be insane. We need some form of ranked-choice voting, or at least Approval Voting, to make sense of it all.