Democracy, animal-style

I love Jamba Juice and I love In-n-Out, but I wasn't to keen on the idea of recalling elected officials. Still, Hertzberg makes some valid points in his Talk of the Town piecelet in defense of Cali.

Specifically, having a larger field of potential candidates (ideally more than 2, but fewer than 134...) would move politcal
discourse ever-so-slightly past the current non-stop mudslinging, since presumably it's not possible to run separate attack ads against
each of a multitude of people. Key to ensuring that the larger playing field is full of candidates that have some chance of being elected
is adopting an alternative voting system, such
as the instant runoff voting method that Hertzberg advocates. Moving away from simple majority
voting would of course be a huge blow to
the established political parties, so how the hell will there ever be any sort of reform? There won't ever be.

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