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Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

What infuriates me is that both of the California Senators are co-sponsoring this piece of garbage. One of them is Dianne Feinstein, who is up for re-election this year. I'm a solid Democratic voter, but there is no way someone who sponsors SOPA or PIPA will get my vote.

Even better than phone calls would be the emergence of a non-SOPA supporting Democrat running against Senator Feinstein. I'm sure the prospect of losing Northern California to a challenger would get her attention.

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It's too late for a Democratic primary challenger to enter the race and even in the general election the Republicans only have some fringe candidates. She's basically running unopposed.

we need a 3rd party, or better yet change voting to preferential voting, so you can vote for who you want and not against who you don't.

that way you can say I like this guy, but in case he doesn't win, I'll settle for this one

Instant-runoff voting. It's already used by many state and local governments, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to implement nationally.

Instant-runoff is a terrible voting system and should never be used, see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ . Approval voting is simpler and better. Condorcet is best except that it is somewhat complicated.

I had dug into the math behind this at some point and recall that Borda was argued (e.g. by Saari's "Basic Geometry of Voting") to be the "best" in the sense of invariance under impossible-to-satisfy group preference cycles (A > B > C >A), with Condorcet a close second.

If you have any references arguing for Condorcet over Borda, I would be very interested to read them.

Edit: For people unfamiliar with the jargon, Borda is ranked-list voting, with the winner being the candidate with the highest average rank. Condorcet is pairwise-comparison voting with the winner being the candidate that wins the highest fraction of pairwise comparisons.

In this jargon, "first past the post" systems select the person with the highest fraction of being ranked first; this is argued in the literature to be intimately tied to the two-party dominance in the US.

Hollywood must be paying handsomely

They are: http://www.defendtheinter.net/

(scroll down to see a list of Congress members ranked by media industry donations)

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