I propose the formation of a voters' union, to be named Voters' Union. It would be an organization of, for, and by voters having the purpose of empowering voters. It would convey information from voters to voters and also from candidates to voters and from voters to candidates. Since it would convey information, I suppose that would make it a "branch of the media".
Voters' Union would recruit voters to join. Perhaps it would be worth distinguishing two overlapping classes of member: dues-paid members and identity-checked members. The latter could participate in the union's polling. But perhaps all should have equal power in the internal government of the union. So maybe the dues-paid distinction wouldn't be that useful, but there may be reason to at least ask for money from members so as to be able to buy commercial means of checking identity, advertising for recruitment, and web services. The union would never register itself as a political party nor take positions on questions other than those that bear on the political power of the voters.
A primary operation of the union, as I mentioned, would be to poll voters (this would be limited to voters who are members, but I think that is not a significant limitation, as the union would try to recruit all voters to join, and I see no reason a voter would not want to join except for the case of voters who oppose the principle of equality of political power), and to announce the results of those polls. I should think that this operation, if sufficient proportion of the voters participate, would remove the fuel (or the oxidizer) from the fire so to speak that happens when a candidate is accused of being a "spoiler" as Mr. Nader was. No one would be a spoiler. If the voters like a candidate the best, they can then go to the official election and experience plurality. Why? Because they are informed where their fellow voters stand, a condition missing in the absence of the union and missing in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
In addition to the primary informational function of conducting the polls, the union could provide a common form and forum where candidates could inform the voters about the candidates' positions on any kind of political question, and could take questions from the voters if they so chose. This could be done on a web site. Accepting the statement of one more candidate would have microscopic incremental cost, except perhaps on the time and attention of the voters and on the signal-to-noise ratio of the candidate forum. If that becomes a problem, I suppose the union could put in place a system where voters (maybe even by faction) could rate the interestingness of candidates and that would determine their order of presentation or readers could invoke filters based on such ratings.
So, a branch of the media? Yes, in the sense that the operations of the union would inform people about what other people say. But the union would differ markedly from the Washington _Post_ for example in being owned by the voters, and controlled by the voters via the union's internal political mechanism, and therefore could be expected to exercise whatever flexibility its charter allowed, in favor of the voters and not in favor of any interest that conflicts with the public interest.
On Wednesday, May 13, 2015 at 12:00:57 PM UTC-4, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder,
http://RangeVoting.org) wrote
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/electionscience/b0cBni8GGh4/H75v-ji2l78J