I have no idea who Paganpower is, but the post "Worth less than slaves" is beyond ludicrous. Not only is the supposed comparison historical nonsense, but "a day that [actually, it should be "which" to quote the original] will live in infamy"? Please.
The rule that southern votes would be expanded by 3/5 for the slaves was not particularly logical, but they needed a compromise to get the southern states to agree to Union. (Would we have been better off if they made a USA with just the yankees? Probably we'd have stayed out of the war of 1812 and been battered neutrals instead. Minor wars between some southern nations, and maybe the british would have burned Charlestown? It's real hard to predict more than 5 years ahead.)
The compromise to accept half votes for these two states looks to me like it's similar quality. They need some kind of compromise and they aren't going to let logic get in their way.
Quite different in detail but some ways it's a fair comparison. What interests me is how much bitterness will show up. Vote for McCain because Obama isn't good enough? That's pretty extreme for a Democrat.
I'd kind of like to see both major parties take some losses. They're both pretty bad because they only have to compete with each other. In theory duopolies aren't much better than monopolies. If the GOP lost more than half their votes to Libertarians and the Democrats lost more than half their votes to Greens I think I'd be pleased. Elect a president with around 26% of the popular vote, get a whole lot of freshman congressmen ....
The two major parties have shown they deserve to be minor parties. Give somebody else a chance.
The post I linked to suggests that the DNC compromise is a worse form of disenfranchisement than that experienced by the slaves under the 3/5 compromise, which is just offensive and insane.
The 3/5 compromise had nothing to do with how to count the votes of slaves, but how to count the *population* of slaveholding states for the purpose of allocating representatives. What people forget is that the northern proposal of not counting slaves at all was *less* dehumanizing than counting them at 3/5 or 5/5, insofar as it didn't pretend that people deprived of their civil and political rights could be represented by the whites who kept them in bondage.
And to compare Florida and Minnesota Democratic primary voters to slaves is so idiotic as to cross over into a kind of racism; it belittles the suffering of slaves in the US.
I'd prefer some form of PR, but in the absence of that I see little good coming from third parties, particularly those with the policy positions of the Greens and the Libertarians.
I think your stand about the comparison between the 3/5 rule and the 1/2 rule is a legitimate one. While there's a sense that a decent comparison could be made, it isn't out of line to say that the current claim is invidious.
If we could get something like IRV, Instant Runoff Voting, then third parties wouldn't be so much cut out. People could vote for their first choices and not lose the chance to vote for the second choice too. Our current third parties are stuck without a chance to win, so they must take positions that get them fringe votes -- the people who don't care that they're throwing their votes away. With an actualy chance to win they'd try to field electable candidates.
I don't particularly like the current libertarian or green stands, but I firmly believe we'd be better off with more than two choices.
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