John Arnold: belief

Transcript context

…Electoral reform, political reform — and I mean the systems by which we choose leaders and policies — do you have favored ways you would change those? I think a lot of the original sin of the elections and the electoral system in the US is the primary system and non-competitive races between the parties, so the vast majority of House seats — the only competition happens in the primary. The person who’s more likely to show up in the primary is more extreme than the average or median Republican or Democratic voter. In many jurisdictions, the independents are not allowed to vote in the primary. There’s more money that comes in from the extremes, and so you end up with a legislature, a Congress that is more extreme than the people are. The independents or the moderates are very much underrepresented in today’s political system, and it eliminates a lot of the incentive, or creates disincentive, for internal party debate. So, we should do single transferable vote or something else?…

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