I congratulate Jack Stick on winning the election.  He ran a positive campaign and, though we disagree on some issues, is probably the better of my two opponents.  It's a thrill to have received 1,203 votes, 3.09% of the vote.  Thanks to all who voted for me!  I plan to leave this page online for reference purposes.

Lower taxes, less government waste!

My platform

For details on my issue stances, see my answers to VoteSmart's 2002 Texas State Legislative National Political Awareness Test.  Unfortunately, my opponents chose not to respond to the NPAT, but we are compared in the smaller-scale LWV Voter's Guide.

My political philosophy emphasizes individual liberty and individual responsibility.  Political solutions to Texas problems rarely work well and often make things worse; whatever government can do, private enterprise can do better.  Government should not be in the business of education, health care or wealth redistribution, and it shouldn't promote one system of morals over another.  A good government is small and inexpensive, only protecting individual rights and enforcing valid contracts.  The only legitimate crimes are actions that violate the rights of others, such as murder, theft and fraud.

My primary legislative priority will be to promote freedom by doing whatever I can to slow and reverse the growth of state government.  I will oppose bills that raise current taxes, propose new ones or expand state bureaucracy, and I will support lowering taxes drastically and privatizing education and health care.  I will work to repeal laws that exercise state control over the private lives of individuals, such as laws against drug use, sexual acts and assisted suicide.  Also, I am against government bond issues; the government should never spend money it doesn't have.  I support real campaign reform, but I oppose public financing of election campaigns and will never accept state campaign funding—you should never have to pay for a campaign you don't support.  In short, I will do all I can to return our state government to the limits set out in the U.S. and Texas Constitutions.

My secondary legislative priority will be to advocate the use of Approval Voting in public single-winner elections.  What is Approval Voting?  Read on . . .

Approval Voting

Third parties in the United States have had very limited success.  It's not that American voters are unreceptive to third-party ideas; in fact, many feel alienated by the two major parties and would like to have a wider choice available, but most decline to vote for third-party candidates for fear of throwing their vote away.  In the 2000 presidential election, many Nader supporters voted insincerely for Gore, but enough voted for Nader to throw the election to Bush.  (And although Libertarians tend to be more idealistic, surely there were some Browne supporters who hedged their bets and voted for a lesser evil.)  Voters shouldn't have to desert their favorite candidate to vote for their lesser of the "two evils", and third-party candidates shouldn't have to end up being spoilers for frontrunners.  It's usually assumed that these problems are unavoidable, but the truth is that they're entirely due to our lone-mark plurality voting system.

Approval Voting solves the lesser-of-two-evils and spoiler problems.  Under Approval Voting, each voter simply votes for ("approves") one or more candidates; the winner is the candidate with the most approval votes.  Ballot formats and voting equipment don't have to be changed for Approval Voting and runoffs are never necessary.  In fact, in a sense, Approval is even simpler than the current system, since the vote-for-only-one restriction is removed.  No ballots are thrown out for overvotes; the votes are simply added up.

Here's a comparison of plurality and Approval ballots.  Try them out to get a feel for what it would be like to vote in an Approval election.

Pretty simple, isn't it?

The winner of an Approval election is much more likely to be broadly acceptable to the voters than the winner of a plurality election.  Election results might be reported as "Candidate X received 59% approval", like a Presidential approval rating, rather than "Candidate X received 43% of the vote", as in our current elections.  And no voter would ever have a reason not to vote for a favorite candidate:  Nader fans would have had the option of voting for both Nader and Gore, Buchanan fans could have voted for both Buchanan and Bush, etc.  (Of course, anyone who'd want to vote for only one would be free to do so.)  Approval Voting would end the current Republican/Democratic duopoly and allow all parties a fair chance to appeal to voters.  If you've ever voted for a lesser evil instead of your real first-choice candidate, you should support Approval Voting.

The Texas LP platform endorses a "None of the Above" ballot option for all elections, with no candidate filling the office if the NOTA option receives the most votes.  In Approval, instead of having a NOTA ballot option, "None of the Above" can be said to have won an election when no candidate is approved by at least 50% of the voters.

The alternative voting system that has received the most publicity lately is Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).  IRV uses ranked ballots to simulate a series of plurality elections, eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-place votes at each step.  While IRV seems intuitive to voters who are used to plurality, it has some severe disadvantages when compared to Approval Voting.  Perhaps most important, IRV needs ballots that allow ranking of candidates, so implementing IRV would require potentially expensive upgrades of almost all voting equipment in the country and reteaching the public how to vote.  If anything can be learned from the 2000 Florida mess, it's that ballots must be as simple as possible.  In addition, IRV fails to solve the lesser-of-two-evils and spoiler problems; it's still possible for a voter to regret voting a favorite candidate in first place.  (It's always to your advantage to vote for your favorite candidate under Approval.)  So IRV ends up being the worst of both worlds, having neither the simplicity nor the fairness of Approval.

In my opinion, getting Approval Voting implemented in public elections should be a top priority of the Libertarian Party, and it would be to any party's advantage to use Approval in their primary and internal elections for its ability to find candidates that have across-the-board appeal.

Further information

Note that there is no incumbent in the new Texas House District 50; it's the light yellow area in the northeast corner of Travis County in this map.  To see which House district you're in for the 2002 elections, check your voter registration certificate or enter your postal address in this form.

Take the World's Smallest Political Quiz to get a rough idea of your true political orientation; I score 90% on personal issues and 100% on economic issues.  Project Vote Smart and DemocracyNet offer information on elections and candidates to help you make an informed choice.

Studying the U.S. Constitution is the first and most important step toward understanding American government.  No law supersedes the Constitution, but many laws violate it.  Longtime liberty activist Michael Badnarik offers an enlightening and entertaining Introduction to the Constitution that I can't recommend highly enough; I've attended the class twice.  The Constitution Society homepage is an invaluable online source of information on the U.S. Constitution that everyone should take the time to explore.

I was the guest of host Rock Howard on the Libertarian TV show Live and Let Live on Austin cable channel 10 from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, 22 June 2002.  We discussed IRV and Approval Voting, two proposals for improving the lone-mark plurality voting system for single-winner elections.  I explained why IRV would fail to live up to the promises of its promoters and why Approval Voting is a simpler, superior alternative.  I also appeared along with other local candidates on the 19 October show hosted by Michael Badnarik.

For me, the best thing about getting involved with the Libertarian Party has been the fellow members.  Come to a TCLP outreach meeting sometime and meet some friendly folks who are working for liberty in Travis County!