2 ms·

I think what's absurd is that we have a highly polarized political landscape that combined wit the voting system leads to a two party system. That could be easi

I think what's absurd is that we have a highly polarized political landscape that combined wit the voting system leads to a two party system. That could be easily changed by switching to approval voting. Neither Hilary nor Trump would be close to being viable candidates, since they both had bad approval ratings. As it is now everyone is just voting against the candidate they are most scared of. What's even more absurd is that the actual votes are being counted on a per-state basis. If someone where to design the system from scratch nowadays nobody would even come up with a system that dumb. Just count all the votes. What's the point of involving states at all in a federal election? It shouldn't matter in a federal election if I live in California or Georgia. It's absurd that it does!

seren 10y ago
The polarized political landscape is probably a result of the voting system though. In a winner take it all systems, you can get a vote at "any cost" since you won't have to make any coalition later. The only thing in favor of the system is that it creates a clear winner, proportional systems might be more fair, but if parties fail to create a majority coalition you are back to square one. An ideal system might need to mix these two approaches (and some other like vote ranking, lists, etc)