4 ms·

And just to show how disconnected our government is, the Democrats barely support it, and the Republicans outright do not support it. Ridiculous. But hey, cont

And just to show how disconnected our government is, the Democrats barely support it, and the Republicans outright do not support it. Ridiculous. But hey, continue not voting for a third party. That will sure fix things.

forinti 9y ago
For starters, the title should be "Americans from the two major parties...".
5ilv3r 9y ago
I love the "throwing your vote away" argument. Sorry guys, by voting for the big two, YOU are the one throwing it away. Third party support growth is a great indicator of the public's desire for real change. So what if you lose? You're voting to express your opinion, not to win.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > So what if you lose? You're voting to express your opinion, not to win. It sounds like you don't actually have much at stake here. If you're poor, or queer, or Muslim, and you're choosing between a high-minded protest vote vs. keeping out the guy who will spend the next four years trying to destroy your family's safety, you sure as hell are voting to win.
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    A poll showing huge support for a candidate from the poor queer Muslims would be a hell of a thing, wouldn't it? I grew up poor. I am queer. Winning isn't everything. Sometimes enough people need to care for things to change, and sacrificing what you care about to win will NEVER get you there.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  > You're voting to express your opinion, not to win. No, that's not why most people vote. And to be clear, I have nothing against anyone voting to express their opinion (vote is speech, after all), but most people actually use their vote to make their next few years as least shit as possible. That often means voting for someone you disagree with, because they're more likely to win. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons that Emmanuel Macron managed to finish first in the first french election round).
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    You can choose to play politics, but nothing says you have to. I think we've done it too much already. If you have to sacrifice most of what you care about to win, you lose yourself, and that is heart breaking.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > So what if you lose? You're voting to express your opinion, not to win. If I want to "express my opinion", I'll write an essay. Voting—which is by secret ballot—is poor for expressing opinions. It's to participate in choice of political leadership or (in the case of initiatives and referenda) concrete policy. In that light, winning—that is, getting the best outcome attainable in terms of leader or policy chosen—is more important than expressing opinion. Now, ideally, the electoral system would aggregate opinions well such that there would be nomdofferenve between optimizing for outcome and optimizing for accurate expression of opinion. But you go into the ballot box with the voting system you have, not the voting system you wish you had.
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    That's trying to influence people, not express an opinion on policy or candidates up for consideration. Winning isn't as important is being right, in my opinion.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I vote because of the practical consequences it has. Voting for a candidate who can win can have practical consequences. Voting for someone with no chance of winning has no practical consequences. Voting to express your opinion is ridiculous. Expressing your opinion by voting has as much effect as expressing your opinion by shouting at a cloud. If you want viable third parties you have to change the system. The way it's designed now, viable third parties are impossible. Doesn't matter how much you vote for them. If by some chance you manage to make a third party into a viable national force, they will just displace one of the current major parties and you'll be back to a two-party system with slightly different labels.
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    You said impossible. I don't even need to come up with something clever here.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ghigufufyfufu 9y ago
  In MA, we are pushing for instant runoff and Democrats just added it to the state platform. Stop complaining and help make it happen around America! Then other political parties will be viable.
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    That sounds more complicated...
    - ghigufufyfufu 9y ago
      It has the virtue of actually working. The mathematics of first past the post means the spoiler critique is literally true even as it undermines Democratic ideals. This tension can only be resolved by structural change.
mwfunk 9y ago
In the current system, it sure seems like all those third party votes do is make sure that whichever mainstream candidate you consider the greater evil is that much more likely to win, since presumably you're voting for a third party rather than who you perceive to be the lesser evil. To the degree that the US government really is disconnected from the people it represents (which I hope it is, because the alternative is much more hopeless), the solutions are getting money out of politics as much as possible, and adopting systems of voting which make it easier for third parties to be successful (or at least, constructively influential).
- nategri 9y ago
  Re: Money-in-politics: I used to consider myself a Lessig-style single issue voter, but now everything is on fire and during the next 4 years there's a good chance I'll just vote for anyone holding a bucket of water. Once things are back to being normal-broken (instead of meta-broken), I'll get back on the wagon.
  - zanny 9y ago
    The problem is that normal-broken is going to be more broken than it was in 2016 pre-Trump, which was more broken than in 2000 pre-Bush, which was more broken than in 1992 pre-Clinton, which was more broken... etc. I only don't mention Obama because, despite his mass expansion of drone warfare, erosion of civil liberties, total corruption in the face of wall street destroying the economy (and in response to Occupy), flawed healthcare law, military interventionism, and botched promises (nice job closing gitmo) Bush was so bad that it basically just maintained a status quo badness throughout his administration by shifting the bad from the absurdly bad (extreme torture, geneva violations, letting entire cities sink) to just normally bad (including letting a city parch itself on toxic lead water, which is still happening by the way). It is also valuable to consider that the more broken it gets, the harder it is to correct. The more power the oligarchs have, the more rules put in place to prevent protest and revolution. Gerrymandering has (on average) only gotten worse. The longer you wait to realign reality against neoliberalism the more traumatizing the correction is (and the more people that suffer and die under the regime, either from lack of healthcare access to being blown up by tomahawks).
akhilcacharya 9y ago
Barely support it? Hillary ran on it and Obama's pick lead to reclassification.
Darthy 9y ago
It's funny to me that obviously the "First-past-the-post" voting system is reason for so much problems in the US, from amplified corporate influence to a president who has very little support with the public. Why don't you - yes you who is reading this right now - start a long term grassroots campaign with the goal to move to a better system within 20 years. This would be the most important thing that you would have ever done, and it would make America better, and it would make the world better.
- czinck 9y ago
  Our (hopefully benevolent) AI overlords will be in control well before the US changes away from first-past-the-post, at least on the whole. The US is too geographically and culturally distinct (for good reasons, not just blue/red states) to implement proportional representation in a way that doesn't piss off everyone. I had written some more explaining why, but the simple fact that you'd need to convince roughly half of US states to vote to give themselves less power means this would never happen. We can't even get reforming the Electoral College through enough blue states, and the President is supposed to represent all states.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > The US is too geographically and culturally distinct (for good reasons, not just blue/red states) to implement proportional representation in a way that doesn't piss off everyone. Candidate centered more proportional systems with multimember districts (e.g., STV) could be implemented without substantially changing the state based structure or apportionment of legislative power (if you go with fixed five-member districts for the House, you'd need to increase the quantum of apportionment to 5 seats, which would somewhat shift power unless you quintupled the number of seats.) This would leave the regional distortions in place, but address the limited-time problems of duopoly.

forinti 9y ago

For starters, the title should be "Americans from the two major parties...".

5ilv3r 9y ago

I love the "throwing your vote away" argument. Sorry guys, by voting for the big two, YOU are the one throwing it away. Third party support growth is a great indicator of the public's desire for real change. So what if you lose? You're voting to express your opinion, not to win.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
> So what if you lose? You're voting to express your opinion, not to win. It sounds like you don't actually have much at stake here. If you're poor, or queer, or Muslim, and you're choosing between a high-minded protest vote vs. keeping out the guy who will spend the next four years trying to destroy your family's safety, you sure as hell are voting to win.
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  A poll showing huge support for a candidate from the poor queer Muslims would be a hell of a thing, wouldn't it? I grew up poor. I am queer. Winning isn't everything. Sometimes enough people need to care for things to change, and sacrificing what you care about to win will NEVER get you there.
scrollaway 9y ago
> You're voting to express your opinion, not to win. No, that's not why most people vote. And to be clear, I have nothing against anyone voting to express their opinion (vote is speech, after all), but most people actually use their vote to make their next few years as least shit as possible. That often means voting for someone you disagree with, because they're more likely to win. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons that Emmanuel Macron managed to finish first in the first french election round).
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  You can choose to play politics, but nothing says you have to. I think we've done it too much already. If you have to sacrifice most of what you care about to win, you lose yourself, and that is heart breaking.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> So what if you lose? You're voting to express your opinion, not to win. If I want to "express my opinion", I'll write an essay. Voting—which is by secret ballot—is poor for expressing opinions. It's to participate in choice of political leadership or (in the case of initiatives and referenda) concrete policy. In that light, winning—that is, getting the best outcome attainable in terms of leader or policy chosen—is more important than expressing opinion. Now, ideally, the electoral system would aggregate opinions well such that there would be nomdofferenve between optimizing for outcome and optimizing for accurate expression of opinion. But you go into the ballot box with the voting system you have, not the voting system you wish you had.
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  That's trying to influence people, not express an opinion on policy or candidates up for consideration. Winning isn't as important is being right, in my opinion.
mikeash 9y ago
I vote because of the practical consequences it has. Voting for a candidate who can win can have practical consequences. Voting for someone with no chance of winning has no practical consequences. Voting to express your opinion is ridiculous. Expressing your opinion by voting has as much effect as expressing your opinion by shouting at a cloud. If you want viable third parties you have to change the system. The way it's designed now, viable third parties are impossible. Doesn't matter how much you vote for them. If by some chance you manage to make a third party into a viable national force, they will just displace one of the current major parties and you'll be back to a two-party system with slightly different labels.
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  You said impossible. I don't even need to come up with something clever here.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ghigufufyfufu 9y ago
In MA, we are pushing for instant runoff and Democrats just added it to the state platform. Stop complaining and help make it happen around America! Then other political parties will be viable.
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  That sounds more complicated...
  - ghigufufyfufu 9y ago
    It has the virtue of actually working. The mathematics of first past the post means the spoiler critique is literally true even as it undermines Democratic ideals. This tension can only be resolved by structural change.

mwfunk 9y ago

In the current system, it sure seems like all those third party votes do is make sure that whichever mainstream candidate you consider the greater evil is that much more likely to win, since presumably you're voting for a third party rather than who you perceive to be the lesser evil. To the degree that the US government really is disconnected from the people it represents (which I hope it is, because the alternative is much more hopeless), the solutions are getting money out of politics as much as possible, and adopting systems of voting which make it easier for third parties to be successful (or at least, constructively influential).

nategri 9y ago
Re: Money-in-politics: I used to consider myself a Lessig-style single issue voter, but now everything is on fire and during the next 4 years there's a good chance I'll just vote for anyone holding a bucket of water. Once things are back to being normal-broken (instead of meta-broken), I'll get back on the wagon.
- zanny 9y ago
  The problem is that normal-broken is going to be more broken than it was in 2016 pre-Trump, which was more broken than in 2000 pre-Bush, which was more broken than in 1992 pre-Clinton, which was more broken... etc. I only don't mention Obama because, despite his mass expansion of drone warfare, erosion of civil liberties, total corruption in the face of wall street destroying the economy (and in response to Occupy), flawed healthcare law, military interventionism, and botched promises (nice job closing gitmo) Bush was so bad that it basically just maintained a status quo badness throughout his administration by shifting the bad from the absurdly bad (extreme torture, geneva violations, letting entire cities sink) to just normally bad (including letting a city parch itself on toxic lead water, which is still happening by the way). It is also valuable to consider that the more broken it gets, the harder it is to correct. The more power the oligarchs have, the more rules put in place to prevent protest and revolution. Gerrymandering has (on average) only gotten worse. The longer you wait to realign reality against neoliberalism the more traumatizing the correction is (and the more people that suffer and die under the regime, either from lack of healthcare access to being blown up by tomahawks).

akhilcacharya 9y ago

Barely support it? Hillary ran on it and Obama's pick lead to reclassification.

Darthy 9y ago

It's funny to me that obviously the "First-past-the-post" voting system is reason for so much problems in the US, from amplified corporate influence to a president who has very little support with the public. Why don't you - yes you who is reading this right now - start a long term grassroots campaign with the goal to move to a better system within 20 years. This would be the most important thing that you would have ever done, and it would make America better, and it would make the world better.

czinck 9y ago
Our (hopefully benevolent) AI overlords will be in control well before the US changes away from first-past-the-post, at least on the whole. The US is too geographically and culturally distinct (for good reasons, not just blue/red states) to implement proportional representation in a way that doesn't piss off everyone. I had written some more explaining why, but the simple fact that you'd need to convince roughly half of US states to vote to give themselves less power means this would never happen. We can't even get reforming the Electoral College through enough blue states, and the President is supposed to represent all states.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The US is too geographically and culturally distinct (for good reasons, not just blue/red states) to implement proportional representation in a way that doesn't piss off everyone. Candidate centered more proportional systems with multimember districts (e.g., STV) could be implemented without substantially changing the state based structure or apportionment of legislative power (if you go with fixed five-member districts for the House, you'd need to increase the quantum of apportionment to 5 seats, which would somewhat shift power unless you quintupled the number of seats.) This would leave the regional distortions in place, but address the limited-time problems of duopoly.