One of the pet political causes of the Green Party is to mandate proportional representation in Congressional races, together with an "instant run-off", where your second pick for an office gets your vote once he's eliminated. We used the latter system at Berkeley for student elections, and it allowed people to vote the Boring Party slate before they got around to selecting the people they really wanted to see in office. Proportional representation, on the other hand, is an idea whose time has definitely not come, as one can see from this week's election in Israel. Although it might be good to have some reasonable threshold for enabling small parties a chance to elect candidates without having to seriously compromise its views, like, say, ten percent, the notion that a candidate or party supported by one out of twenty voters can gain office strikes me as absurd. Fifty percent is a mandate, thirty percent is a movement, five percent is a fringe. And unless Sharon can convince some Fifth Column within the Labor Party to join his government, he probably will have to call new elections. Again.