Dale Sheldon Hess of The Least of All Evils will resume blogging...

This, along with his recent home ownership, marriage and involvement with the occupy movement,is good news.
I've posted a comment, updating him on me.

I have been a part of the Election Methods listserve. I've been arguing that we need to value the X*P of election rules and that in the short run, |Xirv-Xoth| << Pirv-Poth, especially if we hybridize irv with approval voting, couple it with an even stronger push for American forms of Proportional Representation, learn the lessons from Burlington and prevent ourselves from getting divided and conquered like what happened there. 

I've also been arguing that we don't need to move away from a 2-party dominated polity so long as we move away from our tendency to be 1-party dominated. This is part and parcel of my defense of IRV, since the diffs in election rules are less important when there are fewer serious candidates and arguably IRV does tend to keep a system 2-party dominated and to give the two biggest parties strong incentives to realign around the moving center. Cases like Burlington happen when there is a transition as to which 2 parties are dominant and one of the bigger parties has not aligned itself near the true political center. The ability of a non Condorcet-Winner party to win under IRV is the stick that coerces the major parties to realign around the true center...

It's been interesting...

WRT CFR,
1. It's damn hard to get at the nat'l level. #OWS's ethos tends to be on more local/state issues. 
2. It's damn hard to enforce well when the foxes are guarding the henhouse. 
3. I think the answer likely to emerge from #OWS movement are networks of LTPs that specialize in "more local" and vote strategically in "less local" elections so as to check the influence of $peech. This need not end the existence of minor parties, but given our current dysfunctional election system, they're more fit and better continue the #0WS emph on decentralization 

And, of course, I hope they'll rally around American forms of PR that increase the number of competitive elections (a natural, easier to enforce way to check $peech), remove the perverse incentives due to the tendency of our system to tilt to effective single-party rule, and that give economic/ethnic/ideological minorities better chances to be swing voters.

dlw