The rule, exactly. Before an election each citizen chooses: to vote — or to take a payment and not vote in that election. The payment is a percentage of the median income, set by referendum; there is no fixed sum. One ballot is one vote, with no multiplier in the count; the vote is amplified only in that each ballot's share grows as others step out. The budget pays under law; a candidate never pays. Only a referendum of all citizens — simple majority, no quorum — introduces, changes or repeals the rule.
The protocol has been introduced nowhere and no pilot has been run: shares, turnout and outcome figures in the chapters are estimates, and the protocol promises nobody an election victory. If a chapter says otherwise, Exact Answers and the Charter are correct. For a candidate: ten questions and ten steps. For a citizen, a mayor, a finance officer, a donor, a journalist, a scholar, a lawyer: answers by role. Everything in force in one file: llms-full.txt.
The US: Why a State "Belongs" to a Party for Half a Century, Why the Middle Cannot Be Chosen, and Whether a Third Party Is Needed¶
Chapter: 10 — Case: the USA File: 10_059k · v1 · 15 October 2026 Source: the architect's question of 15 October 2026: "I do not quite understand how a state can belong to some party… Kansas has voted for one party for fifty years — that is strange; so a third party is badly needed?"; the assistant's answer from standard political science (Campbell et al., The American Voter, 1960; Duverger; Gallup; Kansas results 2018–2022). Moved from a separate repository by the architect's decision.
1. A state does not belong to a party — it is a statistic under "winner takes all"¶
In Kansas the Republicans take 55–60 % in presidential elections, that is, 40 % of Kansans vote Democratic every time. They are invisible because all the state's electors go to the winner. "A red state" means not "everyone is for the party" but "a majority steadily a little over half, and the counting rule erases the rest".
2. Why the majority is stable for decades¶
- A party is a brand for a bundle, not an idea. The voter chooses a package — taxes, guns, religion, town or country — and packages change slowly. Kansas is agrarian, Protestant, rural, and the Republican package has been closer to it since the 1930s. Realignments come every 30–40 years: 1932, 1968–1980, partly 2016.
- Partisanship is inherited, like a confession. The American Voter: party identity is taken from parents and surroundings before views are. When the party changes its logic — Trump changed it on trade, on Russia, on the size of the state — the majority does not leave; it redefines what "ours" means.
- With two options people vote "against", not "for". A Republican who finds Trump repellent looks at the alternative and sees a package he finds more repellent. He chooses the lesser evil. A party can afford almost any candidate as long as the opponent is scarier.
3. Why the middle cannot be chosen¶
Duverger's law: under single-member districts and plurality rule, a third candidate takes votes from the nearest one and hands victory to the opposite — Perot in 1992, Nader in 2000. A vote for a moderate is a gift to the one you want least. The moderate either holds his nose or stays home — and that is exactly "the burned" (1f §6). Add the primaries: the candidate is chosen by the party's active core, typically 15–20 % of voters and more radical than the average, so both parties field people further from the middle than their own electorate. The middle is absent from the ballot not because nobody wants it — by Gallup about 60 % of Americans say a third party is needed — but because the counting rule punishes it.
4. The proof is in Kansas itself¶
The governor of Kansas since 2019 is a Democrat, Laura Kelly, elected twice because a moderate was fielded against a radical. In August 2022, in a referendum on an abortion ban, 59 % of Kansans voted against the ban — in a "red" state. When the party label is removed from the ballot and the question is left, the same state votes differently. People are logical; the menu is not (040ae item 5, who orders the menu).
5. Is a third party needed¶
Under the present count it will not survive — the same Duverger's law punishes it. Attempts to fix the count — ranked-choice voting — are being rolled back (059i §5, Alaska, 3 November 2026). The protocol's conclusion: what must change is not the number of parties but who chooses the menu. When the returned burned decide with a share, both existing parties move to the middle by themselves (040ag item 5, power turns to the centre), and a third becomes unnecessary. That is already the protocol's thesis, not a description of how things are now.
Weak point¶
The Kansas shares are rounded; "15–20 % in primaries" is a typical turnout, not a Kansas measurement for a given year; Gallup on a third party is a survey of desire, not of readiness to vote for one against Duverger's law. The chapter describes the US; in countries with proportional systems the first three sections do not apply, while the fourth and fifth do.
Related: 059i · 040aj §0 · 040ae item 5 · 040ag item 5 · 1f §5, §6 · 013g