Folks, check out the source of this post's citations: Ominum's companion site The Omnium Annex.Mick, I tip my obligitory cowboy hat to you.

If you've ever taken a fraction of a second consider about who you should vote for, than you'd be familiar with the The Majority Rule Voting Paradox. Peter Harrell explains:

A Majority Rule Voting Paradox exists whenever there is a candidate on the ballot who is preferred to another candidate by a majority of the electorate despite the fact that this preferred candidate is also simultaneously disapproved of by a majority of that same electorate while the other candidate is approved of by a majority of that same electorate.

Think the "electability" debate during the Democratic primaries. Mick noted:

As long as we are electing leaders on the basis of majority rule, those leaders will not be the ones we wanted but the ones most of us didn't want but were willing to suffer. When you understand this, you begin to understand what's really behind the phenomenon of plummeting voter registration: Why bother when your choice is between two people you dislike equally?

Yes, say your little Churchill quote, "Democracy might be the worst system...". Now, if those readers who thought I was about advocating something totalitarian are finished, than allow me to enlighten you to a solution that is beautiful in its simplicy. And best of all, its more Democratic than our so called "best of the worst" systems. Here is the teaser for YNMS (Yes, no, maybe so voting)

When Yes No 'Maybe So' Voting is the voting technique used in an election, each and every voter can vote in one of four ways about each and every candidate on the ballot. The way in which any given voter votes about any one candidate on the ballot does not limit or effect how that voter can vote about any of the other candidates on the ballot.
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Four Types of Yes No 'Maybe So' Votes

Vote Type______ Yes____ No_____Effect on Candidate
Yes Vote_________ X_____________ Most favorable to candidate
Yes/No Vote______ X______ X_____ Next most favorable to candidate
Null Vote________________________ Next least favorable to candidate
No Vote_________________ X______ Least favorable to candidate

I suggest everyone take some time to educate themselves about the possibilities. Its amazing how often people forget that our Government is still a reflection of people living 220 years ago who looked back to Rome and Greece as the models of good government. God help us if they hit the zenith in Democratic innovation. I have a great deal to say about this, but I've been studying government all day and I'm fading into incoherence. Now I drink will proceed to drink a beer, and watch dailyshow clips. However, I'll leave the second superpower with some last thoughts to take into tomorrow:

"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."- Isaac Asimov

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction."- Albert Einstein

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty."- Albert Einstein

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied."-Otto Von Bismarck

"Democracy is the most vile form of government... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." -James Madison

"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."- Plato

"It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires."- Charles de Montesquieu

"A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -John Stuart Mills

"When the solution is simple, God is answering."- Albert Einstein